Food for alchemist?

[LineageRazor]

Even if you hate cooking, try to get it to level 37. Steady Hand II is beautiful. Once you have it, you'll almost never use Steady Hand again. You'll wonder how you ever lived without it.

And, yeah, cooking recipes tend to have a stupidly large number of ingredients - but in most cases, a lot of those ingredients can be bought cheaply at the Culinarians' Guild or the Markets. Take, for example, Beef Stew. It has six ingredients: Sunset Wheat Flour, Buffalo Sirloin, Black Pepper, Wild Onion, Sour Red, and Mineral Water. Of that ingredient list, you only need to buy Buffalo Sirloin off of the marketboards (and it's usually quite cheap there). Sour Red can be bought from the Tradescraft salesperson an any of the three cities' markets, the pepper, Onion, and water can be bought at the Culinarian's Guild, and the Flour can be crafted from Sunset Wheat bought at the Guild. The cost of these ingredients when bought from NPCs instead of from the marketboards is insanely cheap, often under ten gil apiece, when you'd pay hundreds or even thousands if you bought from the Marketboards.

As long as you do your cooking in Limsa Lominsa, getting together all the ingredients you need is pretty cheap and easy - generally MUCH cheaper and easier than the ingredients for other crafts.

If you do decide that you want to get serious about Alchemy, you'll want to level all of your crafting classes to 50. If you do, start with Carpentry. Byergot's Blessing is amazing. It's like a cheat code for HQ. All those easy HQs will make leveling the rest of your classes so much easier.