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A cute little Meerca sneaks up behind you and screams...
Gosh, did I scare you? I'm sorry, I'm PoteHamu5, what's your name?
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Nice to meet you!
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Well, if you are looking for some advice on Gourmet Foods you have come to the right place, because if there's one thing I know its the Gourmet Club, just ask that Quiggle waiter guy who keeps tabs on everyone, he'll tell you. |
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Its absolutely true, Hamu-chan is a real Gourmet, just look at the foods she's eaten, c'est magnifique!
Running Total: 315 |
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What's
that? First you have to convince your owner that there's more to Neopets than making Neopoints, this might be the hardest part of the whole thing, but if you have a kind and generous owner you won't have too much of a problem. If your owner is a meanie have them read these articles my owner wrote for the Neopian Times on how owners should be treating us pets. Neopian
Guide to Better Living: Introduction For those who all ready have nice owners we'll move on ^_^ |
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Getting! The "getting" part of the Gourmet process is probably the hardest and definately the most expensive. Thanks to your fellow gourmets as well as Jhudora (who has my Neotrak, thanks so much), all rarity 99 foods have sky rocketed in price. Chances are you're going to have to buy a lot of foods from the stores they load in if you don't want to go broke. But don't worry, I can help you with that. Its easiest to take it one shop at a time, the best shop to start with is the Food Shop, it loads a lot of items so you can buy things to resell while you're waiting for the gourmet foods to pop up, that way you'll be making money for the ones you might have to buy down the road. Another good idea is to find something to do while you wait for reload, I play Meerca Chase or Pyramids, they are both games that you can stop playing periodically so you can hit "reload" in the shop. The Food Shop also has the greatest number of different gourmet foods that load, and some that don't even seem to belong, from Peachy Pizza to Chocolate Shoyru Meatball the Food Shop is a good shop to cut your teeth on. My general rule for moving on to a new shop is if I can buy all the foods I'm missing from it for under 500,000 NP on the Shop Wizard. That might seem like a lot of Neopoints but like I told potebrigitte, I run that shop while you're at school so I think I should get a little share of the NP! ^_^ hehe I'm just kidding, she's really nice, but don't be afraid to put your paw, hoof, web or whatever down. The next stores that you want to shop in are ones like the Bakery or the Health Food Shop, less items load in there but there are still some good things to resell and the upside is that gourmet items pop up more often. The third tier of shop I call simul-stocks, they are stores that you can check up on periodically while you are reloading another store. To look at them you wouldn't think they had loaded at all, which is why checking up on them once you're sure a reload is in progress is a good idea. Some examples of good simul-stocks are Pizzaroo and its cousin, Hubert's Hot Dogs. You won't get rich off these shops, virtually nothing in them but the gourmet items are worth a thing, but because of that they are virtually deserted, so when you do get something it will be totally worth it in saved Neopoints. The fourth tier of shops I call vulture shops, they are the ones that load little but what loads is highly profitable, that means that every cut throat and profiteer in Neopia is in there trying to make a quick point. You know the shops all ready because if you have anything slower than a T1 you're smart enough to stay away. The Battle Magic Shop and (thanks to the Book Club) the Book Shop are good examples, as far as the Gourmet Club is concerned the Chocolate Factory and the Snow Foods Shop are good examples. For these items I suggest you just bite the bullet and save up for the foods you need from them. Finally there are foods that you just can't get in shops like those adorable Spooky Foods or the original Easter Neggs. Again these are the types of foods that you will just have to buy if you want them, but beware they are very pricey. |
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Before we move on to the next section you might take a moment to really familirize yourself with the gourmet foods that exist in Neopia. There are a lot. To help out my sister PoteGuineaPig tends a checklist on her pet page, you should take a second and go there and look over the list she has. You might want to go ahead and print it out, since it might come in useful to have a paper copy after the next section. You'll see what I mean. Anyway, let's move on to...
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Menu Planning If the getting of the foods is the hardest part then I would classify this as the most important part, the amazing thing is that most people don't even give a though to the way their Gourmet lookup will look. There is no excuse for a sloppy Gourmet Club list, moreover a well planned list is a true status symbol for both you and your owner. You can develop your own system or style of course, but I'm going to show you mine now to get you started. Its really pretty simple. You Gourmet Club display page is a visual catalog of all the Gourmet Foods you've eaten so of course you are going to want it to impress viewers in some way other than by sheer volume of food. I've chosen to group foods together by categories, like cakes or Tyrannian foods, and then I go in an approximate rainbow. I'll go ahead and use the Lost Desert Gourmet foods as an example since there are 14 of them and there are 7 foods per row on the gourmet lookup. For your personal planning you should make a simple 2 Row 7 Column table in a html program or even your pets page, and then just fill in the cells with pictures of the foods. You can add Rows as you go of course, it all depends on how far you want to work ahead. I'm setting the Cellspacing, Cellpadding and Border all to 1 so it shows up as being a table, but you should set them all at 0 for your working chart so you can see if foods run together. |
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| You can orgainze them however you want of course, this is just my goofy system, you could do them by color, shape, even alphapetically! Its your list so make it a badge, something that really shows your personality. Here is another example chart using Chia Pops. Yum, frosty! |
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See how neat the two different types of foods look together when they have a common thread? This is a good example of planning ahead, there isn't a good number of gourmet Chia Pops, so you can take the oppertunity to get creative. You could use the last space to start a slushie row, or use them for the Ultimate Ice Negg or the Mint Chocolate Chia. Whatever you like, but remember to always think ahead! Hamu Helpful Hint: Here's an extremely important tip, due to ancient Neopian customs no one understands or questions no pet will eat a food that has the same number of digits in it as their name (including spaces). PoteHamu5, for example, has 9 digits in it so I won't eat a Chia Cake, Lavaberry, or Cool Negg. Keep this in mind before you spend 100,000 NP on an unbuyable you can't eat! My informal research suggests that to eat every gourmet food you have to have a name that's 3 digits or less or 35 digits or more. Fun! |
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Eating Now that you've spent your Neopoints and planned your menu its time to eat! There seems to be no real difference between waiting a week until you're starving and eating 7 foods at once, and eating 1 food a day when you are hungry. Since no Neopet I know wants to eat once a week I say just take your time. Sure, everyone wants a Gourmet Club Membership Card but I think slow and steady will win this race. In the end the gold card will be held by the pet whose owner loves them enough to pay over 100,000 NP per meal for weeks on end. This is not the greedy man's race, this is a race for real gourmets. |
I'm so stoked to have won the 163rd Site Spotlight Award!
Thank you to all my friends who donated items and gave your support, you all helped me get this far! Thank you plushie_loving_gal, charizard322, moo_moo_67, _originalprankster_0, ake168, jameslucifer, plush_bus_rocks, and trevalyan! I couldn't have done it without all of you!
Want to help Hamu make it to the top of the Gourmet Club? Click Here!
I got my 1st Place Card on 09.14.02!
