I made this tutorial a while back, but never posted it in the tutorial section because I wanted to get Nong97’s permission before I did so. She just gave me the okay to post this, and I would highly recommend that you look at her game on the VX Community site if you like games such as Harvest Moon and Dating Sims in general.
STEP 1:
The Screen
For this, you just need a basic program like GIMP or Photoshop. I’m sure you can make a prettier system than me, but it should help with how she did it. 
Open up that program and make the canvas the default map size ( Width – 544; Height – 416)
1. The first thing I did was make the box where the food title and the “what you will need” part is. Once I did that, I added the little boxes that show where the icons are. Here is a picture of what I came up with:

Use the text box in order to type “What You Need:” in the left corner of the bottom long rectangular box. Now, you will add the squares where you will be placing the ingredients like this: (Note: I used 8 light blue squares. You can add as many as you want.)

2. Now the fun part. 
We are going to add the recipes in each square. I’m just doing four recipes in my tutorial, but you can add as many as you want. I have decided that mine will be Sushi, Stew, Cake, and Fried Fish.
In your game, extract the icon set and then open it up with GIMP/Photoshop. I also got the Harvest Moon Iconset by decadence, I believe. I cannot find the icons at the moment, but I’m assuming you have your own icons you’re using anyway. 
3. Now, I am going to do the Sushi first. The ingredients will be like the one in the video where you need Rice, Two Fish, and Sea Weed.
I go to the icon set and look for anything resembling those ingredients. I also look for something that can look like a sushi recipe.
Going back to my template, I add the icons to the appropriate spots. The sushi icon goes in the top small box and then the ingredients go in the bottom light blue boxes.
3.1 Since this is the active picture, we need to make it look like the sushi icon is highlighted. What I did was make a light blue box and placed it behind the sushi icon. This is what mine looks like:

I save this in the Graphics – Pictures folder as Cooking_Sushi.png.
4. I will do the stew as well to show you the box switching. With this one, the ingredients are: Fish, Water, Mushroom, and Meat.
I repeat the same exact prossess that I did with step 3 and add the icons in the correct spots. After I get it set up to how I want, I move the highlight box that was on the sushi over to the stew icon. This is the finished look:

I save this in the Graphics – Pictures folder as Cooking_Stew.png.
I repeat the same exact steps for the cake and fried fish. I save them as Cooking_Cake.png and Cooking_FriedFish.png.
Now we are done with our pictures! 
STEP 2:
Setting up
Now we need to make the variables and items in order to get this working. The good news is that we just need one variable labeled COOKING.
Look through the ingredients and recipes you have in your pictures. My recipes are Sushi, Stew, Cake, and Fried Fish. For the tutorial, I labeled these in all caps so I know that they are recipes. You can add prices to yours and I made mine consumable.
The ingredients I have are: Egg, Flour, Milk, Chocolate, Fish, Bread, Mushroom, Water, Meat, Sea Weed, and Rice.
With all these ingredients, I put non consumable, but feel free to change that if you’d like. It will not affect the event system at all.
STEP 3:
Making It Work
The next task is getting the event to work. First, click on the oven or cooking space you have created and make an event that is same as characters. The first page is the easiest. We are just going to make it an action button that leads to self switch A and has the menu disabled:

Page 2 is going to be a lot more challenging, but hopefully I can explain it well.
1. Create a conditional branch and on tab 4, either click on button – RIGHT or in the script box use: Input.trigger?(:RIGHT) Unclick the set handling conditions.
1.1 Inside that conditional branch, make another conditional branch and click on the variable panel and get your COOKING variable that you created. Count the number of recipes you have. For me, I just have four recipes, so I will have the COOKING variable less than 3. Unclick the set handling conditions.
1.2 Inside that conditional branch, make the variable COOKING as add + 1. If you want a cursor sound effect when you go through the recipes, then add that inside the conditional branch as well. You should have something like this:

2. Create another conditional branch and on tab 4, either click on button – LEFT or in the script box use: Input.trigger?(:LEFT) Unclick the set handling conditions.
2.1 Inside that conditional branch, make another conditional branch and click on the variable panel and get your COOKING variable that you created. Make the COOKING variable greater than 0. Unclick the set handling conditions.
2.2 Inside that conditional branch, make the variable COOKING as subtract – 1. If you want a cursor sound effect when you go through the recipes, then add that inside the conditional branch as well. You should have something like this:

3. Now, we need to make it so that clicking the right and left button actually does something. We are going to make as many conditional branches as there are recipes. I have four recipes, so I will be making four conditional branches.
3.1 The first conditional branch is my sushi recipe. Make the conditional branch the COOKING variable that we made. make the COOKING variable equal to 0. Unclick the set handling conditions.
3.1.1. Inside that conditional branch, click Display Picture and pick your first recipe picture. Mine is the sushi one, so that is the one I pick.
3.2. The second conditional branch is my stew recipe. Make the conditional branch the COOKING variable that we made. make the COOKING variable equal to 1. Unclick the set handling conditions.
3.2.1. Inside that conditional branch, click Display Picture and pick your second recipe picture.
Keep doing this until you have all your recipe pictures. Here is an example of what mine looks like:

4. We need to do something about what happens when we cancel out of the cooking screen. Since we disabled the menu access on page 1, we can now use the escape button to exit out of the cooking screen. Here is how we do that:
4.1 Go to the conditional branch on tab 4 and click button – B. Unclick the set handling conditions.
4.2. Inside that conditional branch, add clear picture (mine was picture 1, so that is the number I picked). Then, click menu access enable and self switch A = off. This is what it should look like:

5. We need to make it so when we press enter, we can actually cook something! This part is rather long since this is where we add the ingredients.
5.1 Make a conditional branch and have it to where we click on button C. Unclick the set handling conditions. If you want to have a confirmation sound after you click enter, then add it here.
5.2. We are going to repeat a little bit of step 3. We are going to make as many conditional branches as there are recipes again. Since I have four recipes, I will be making four conditional branches again. Place this inside the C button Conditional Branch.
5.2.1 Make the first conditional branch COOKING = 0.Unclick the set handling conditions. Inside that, we are going to add the conditional branch of each ingredient and keep the set handling conditions on. This is long, so I will add a screenshot of what the inside looks like:

Do this for every recipe. After you get them all done, go to the trigger button and make sure it is on Autorun.
Here is what page 2 looks like completed:

And that is how you make the cooking system similar to the game, My Lazy Afternoon.
Thank you so much, Nong97 for giving me the permission to post this.
