Something I thought I should add... saving up certain ingredients for cooking? Pro-tip: do it. Eventually, if you want 100% perfection (in v1.5) you'll likely be asked at some point to cook 100k gold value of food in 2 weeks. Without having saved up cooking ingredients, it is either difficult or expensive to do this. For a frame of reference, the most expensive cooked dishes you can make are Fish Taco and Tropical Curry, and at 500g each you still need 200 of them. Poi? Made with 4 tarot roots and comes in at 400g meaning you need 250 of them which takes a total of 1000 taro roots to do this with Poi alone. (Poi is MUCH more profitable than selling the taro roots.)
Some folks do it all with bread (which is 60g per) after buying a bunch of flour (at 100g per) from Pierre... but that takes 1667 bread, which takes 1667 flour which takes 166.7k gold to do. Sure, you get the 100k from selling the cooked food... but that still means you need 166.7k to start this and will only get 100.02k in return for a net loss of 66.68k. Again, for a frame of reference, 1000 taro roots sell for an average price of 125k... or you could spend 166.7k to do this by turning cash to bread. You could save over 40k each time by just saving ingredients.
(Mind that to get average prices for some things I split differences between what a profession would get and what not having the profession would get. For others I took the average of the regular quality and gold quality, which is the silver quality value. Your mileage may vary based on skill level and professions picked.)
Save up cooking ingredients, people. This quest is SOOO easy if you save up ingredients... and a pain in the butt if you don't.