To my thinking, the most enjoyable aspects of Lord of the Rings Online open up once one lets loose the idea of the optimal, the ideal, the best one can and supposedly ought to do. Especially with multiple avatars — and I have nine on Firefoot — virtual life becomes a pleasurable haze of repeated discovery, even after years of playing.

Here, Beiltil, my brood’s Cooking Guild member, finally gets serious about stocking up the treats every last one of my adventurers ought to have had long ago.