yoo I'm glad you caught the vague reference! we originally didn't intend to make it a "cooking-esque" game, but as we started introducing some of the mechanics we thought "hey this kinda plays like a cooking game, why don't we push it that way?"
and yes we are sadly very aware of the lack of clarity in finding out what to do - not a lot of time for playtesting, and that should always be a top priority, as we learned in previous jams :P
thanks for playing!