Welcome to the Weekly Question Thread on c/guildwars2!
This post is dedicated to those questions that you might not think is worth making a whole post about, but sure is worth getting an answer to ;)
Remember to also take a look at the links in the sidebar, which holds lots of great resources.
There is gw2crafts.net
It’s all about leveling it fast and cheap but it’s probably the best one out there.
The cooking is much like the rest of the crafting. You start out with basic mats and refine them up to a usable item but it emulates IRL cooking in that you make raw materials into something else in between and then use those to get the usable item… Basically just extra steps. It seems really daunting at first but you get the hang of it pretty quickly as you do it.
As for acquiring the ingredients, either through gathering, trading post, or karma vendors. Cooking is the only one with a heavy reliance on karma vendors.