Can I get a resilience gem for my hair net?

So, I'm within spitting distance of the Chef meta-achievement.

"Spitting distance" probably isn't the best term to use in food preparation.

This does come as some small surprise to me. I have been slowly but surely building toward the thing for a while now, doing my cooking dailies, purchasing recipes with my tokens, and all that, but until this weekend it seemed like a very distant, long-term objective.

That is, until I got the cake recipe.

For the longest time I had been laboring under the assumption that two things would be conspiring to push my ability to get this reward back into the new year - first, that I needed to buy the hat and second, that I might need that long to get the cake recipe.

The other reward recipes had been a fairly short wait. I probably only had to do the Outland cooking dailies a dozen times to get all but the cake, and with said cake recipe dropping from the Dalaran quest as well, and under the assumption that I needed over a hundred more cooking awards, I have not bothered to run The Rok's errands for a month or so.

Truth be told, I will admit that I want to finish this meta. While I have been entirely indifferent to my other titles, and have not bothered to display them, this might actually be one that I wear. It's not that I have some great fondness for the cooking mini-game (prior to LK and my desire to produce my own buff food so as not to be a leech off Eric's Northern Spice stockpile I never got cooking about the twenty points or so that I got in the newbie zones just playing around with the concept), and I don't really see Barls as some accomplished RP chef, but there is just something slightly surreal about the thing, something gloriously pointless about having gone through the trouble for something that is an accomplishment which requires almost no fighting of monsters, almost no great deeds, almost no effort at all - just a little time and a lot of repetition. Chef isn't an accomplishment so much as it is a warning, a flag that say that you are the kind of player who can get lost in WoW's roach motel of repetitive grinds, that you are the kind of player who would dedicate hours and hours (but only in 15-minute bursts) to an achievement with no useful outcome, but are still sufficiently adept at being a slack-ass that something that took real effort like Bloodsail Admiral or Diplomat was just not going to happen. It is, in a nutshell, exactly who I am in this game - a completely addicted timesinker with minimal aspirations and no focus.

Chef Barley - says it all.

Getting that aforementioned cake recipe, though, spurred me into action on this process, and encouraged me to actually go and read the requirements again, and when I did, it took me a while to believe that the hat was not a part of it. I checked and double checked several times, in fact, astonished.

Suddenly, an achievement that I had penciled in for January was potentially going to be wrapped up this week.

I only have a couple of steps left, I need purchase two or three more recipes and cook up a few straggling dishes, and I need to go dig those Great Feasts out of the bank I'd onto while skill grinding .

Which means, of course, that I have to go and run a bunch of battlegrounds in order to offer Great Feasts in order to get credit for the Dinner Impossible.

Uh oh.

PvP.

All of which means that for any of you Hordies in the Stormstrike battle group who have been waiting for a chance to laugh at me while I keyboard-turn, you might want to pop into a few random battlegrounds over the next few nights. I'll be the hunter standing over the tray of food looking lost and waiting to be ganked.

Which is to say, I'll be an Alliance toon in PvP.