Cooking for Blockheads is a wonderful mod that gives you three different recipe books to help you create various new dishes in Minecraft. The first book is a basic one that only provides the recipes for what is currently in your inventory. If you have a specific selection of food that correlates to one of the new recipes added with this mod then you can quickly pull them together and make a much more beneficial dish. When you open the basic book you will see the available dishes based on your inventory and then if you click them then the recipe shows up in the left column. This can be a very handy guide to know exactly what you can make with your available ingredients without any trial and error or needing creative mode to access the recipes that way. Now you can see them in one convenient location and make some delicious foods that combine their benefits into one dish instead of several.

The next book is a step up from the basic one which will allow you to actually craft the dishes you click. The basic book was merely a guidebook with the recipes listed but you still needed to craft them in a crafting table after referencing the recipes. With this upgraded book you can see the same recipes but now it allows you to craft them right in the menu. So simply open the book, find the recipe you want, click once to see the recipe and then finally click a second time to craft it.

And there is one final book that gives you even more information and usefulness than the other two. This last book lists all of the available recipes in the game regardless of whether you have the items in your inventory. This can be another useful guide to reference what ingredients you need to find for specific recipes and then you can set out to forage or hunt as needed.

But this mod also allows you to create a full kitchen as well. A mod with only recipe books would be pretty bare bones without giving the player some new blocks to store and cook all your new dishes. You can craft fridges and counters that can store food as ingredients and functions as a much more practical option than simply using chests or your own inventory. And there’s even a new tile block that adds to that classic kitchen, black and white, aesthetic.

The Oven is a neat upgrade to the standard furnace as it allows you to cook up to 9 dishes at the same time. It now makes more sense to cook your food in the appropriate appliance than you normally would with a furnace and it looks more natural in your new kitchen. The other great feature of the oven is that it can also stock up to three items at a time and you can now queue up multiple recipes at once. when dishes finish cooking they will end up in the built in inventory. The oven has its own crafting grid and specific slots for the cooking utensils needed for each new recipe.

So if you want to make a more functional and practical kitchen as well as have a handy series of books to reference any recipe you can make in the game then this is the perfect mod to do just that. It’s fairly simple but that is what makes it a great mod for everything it accomplishes. It gives you some better options to make a kitchen actually look like a kitchen and with the ability to store ingredients and cook them you can’t beat the usefulness of what you can now craft. This mod does also require an additional API installed and can be found here.