Gourmet Cooking (Aka. Cooking with cheese)

Something that I've recently been thinking about is how the cheese making skill invalidates the need for cooking later in the game. The reason for this is because cheese meals are strictly superior to non-cheese meals because they have the same stats but cheese meals give additional max health. Not only that, but cheese stacks significantly better than normal meals. I understand that this is because cheese making is more difficult to level, but I would like to propose something that I believe would make food more interesting.

Despite cheese making being more difficult to level and cheese meals being superior, for some reason cooked meals with cheese do not have the max health bonus. If that max health bonus is your reward for leveling cheese making, it's being wasted when you cook meals with cheese. You're actually downgrading your food with some recipes!

What I would like to suggest is that cooking recipes with cheese included are extra powerful, to make up for the extra difficulty in acquiring cheese for the recipe. This would make cooking more useful even if you have also leveled cheese making, since you can use the cheese to make extra helpful food. Not only that, but it would open more opportunities for player trading since cheese makers could trade their ingredients to chefs, who then create gourmet meals out of them, which I think fits well with the general design of other crafting skills in Project Gorgon.

I would call these recipes "Gourmet" to denote that they're extra good meals, but much harder to cook. I understand that meals like these already have a reason to exist because of the gourmand skill, but I would like to a good reason to cook and eat them more regularly rather than just once, as well as something to make the cooking skill more relevant in the late game.

I don't believe gourmet meals/snacks don't have to be terribly strong or have special bonuses(Perhaps they can simply have cheese stats + 5 levels for example), but it would be excellent if they lasted an extra long amount of time (Ex. 3-8 hours). That way it would feel very rewarding for cooking the meals without needing to worry about making players too strong (And also gets around cheese's superior stack sizes). Special properties like unique buffs for certain meals would be neat, but I know that would be extra work.

I really like this idea, honestly I haven't bothered using cooking for my meals since I was about lvl 30 both cooking and combat. Instead I've just been using sushi as my "cheap" food I use when farming non-elites and cheese for when I farm elites in groups.

From my perspective cooking doesn't really have any place in the game near the end-game since the recipes are so expensive and/or difficult to craft yet the food you get out is inferior to cheese and if you just need something cheap you can make sushi or an easier to craft lower level cooking recipe. Some kind of change like this might give it a bit more relevancy.