In the Kitchen Lore mod, you can discover the magnificent world of food that is available with almost just Vanilla ingredients.
Turn anything edible into a meal (and you'd be surprised how many things are edible if you know what to do with them) and eat to your heart's content!
The logic of the food itself is both based in real life science, as well as the in-game logic of Minecraft itself and even a quirky and mad mixture of the both of them.
Harvest the infinite heat of hell (the Nether) in the Cooking Slab and Distillery.
Turn enemies into a source of food.
Get lost in the complexities, caveats and benefits of consuming alcohol.
Explore the powers dangers of at least 9 different effects! (Can you even find them all?)
Master the mysteries of magical food and cook with Golden Apples, find Phlegethon Water in dungeon chests, feel the warmth of the magical fire of the Hearth Warming Cookies and many more!
Make use of the unique tools, primitive machines, arcane constructs and infinite sources for salt water and carbonation that Kitchen Lore provides you with!
Have your fill in crafting your way through over 300 recipes!
There are many references, jokes, puns and easter eggs hidden throughout the items, descriptions, the code, file names and even across the different languages! Even I myself can't find them all anymore!
The mod was made to both fit into a big kitchen sink type modpack as well as work with vanilla alone. Ergo, all of the documentation explaining the necessary details are provided in the mod itself. No external source or wiki. The advancements will guide your way, for there is an entire tab dedicated to giving a brief explanation to every mechanic, item, recipe and block that is more complex than "craft it and use it".
Also, every recipe available without the Cooking Slab is instantly learned as soon as you enter a world for the first time, while the mod is installed. The recipes that require the slab, are granted upon crafting the slab for the first time. Naturally, this only applies to recipes that you can actually craft in one of the Minecraft GUIs.
Furthermore, the mod forces nothing upon you. Everything you can do is optional and if you try to ignore the mod completely, you will only rarely run across the features. For example, some mobs have more drops now and some chests have expanded loot-tables.
Many of the recipes are vegetarian or vegan and some of the more vague food items can be crafted without using meat too, if that's your cup of tea.
As for balancing, many of the food items have a limited stack size that will feel very alien to many players, for it's 13. To counteract the horrific clutter issues, many of the liquids and soups have designated storage blocks that you can store the food in. However, they do NOT work as mobile storage, once they're put down, you have to either empty them completely or destroy them to get them away again.
There are also a couple of items that are unobtainable in survival mode that have special, unique and sometimes absolutely busted effects. These can be obtained via an admin as a reward, via custom rewards in a custom-made modpack or simply cheated in if you feel like it.
Finally, there are the Harvester Totems. These totems are tools for mining and harvesting. They eat durability from a tool you use (it has to be a tool that extends the vanilla tool classs, btw), use their enchantments in generating the loot table and have different material tiers that increase the hardness of the material that you can mine. They can be used in the early game, midgame and even endgame and even though they are unrepairable, they allow you to mine a 5x5 area with you in the middle around them. The first tier can only harvest things like crops, grasses and flowers and the final tier can even mine obsidian.
If you have read this far, you know most of what Kitchen Lore has to offer for you, but there is still so much more to discover and so many utilities to enjoy. Have fun!