I highly recommend NoM, particularly if you are trying to role play. It provides an abundance of cooked foods for the variety an engaging playthrough needs, especially for those of us that require a varied menu in RL, too.
What I like most of all about NoM is something you won't find in the other needs mods, even those in Oblivion and Skyrim. You can actually see the food cooking! Place a grill, a pan, or a pot close to a fire and load yourself up with the ingredients from your "grocery list". Then, click on the grill/pot/pan and choose "cook something". Drill down through the menus (there aren't that many) and choose the food you want to cook. It will appear in the pan/pot/grill and actually cook before it moves to your inventory. I actually make myself hungry doing this and usually need a short break to eat something myself.
Of course, you can buy already cooked foods from pubs, food vendors, or the occasional trader, but cooking them myself gives me a lot of immersion as soon as I land a new character in Seyda Neen. It's difficult to find the free campfire at first, unless you have Morrowind Crafting. Raw mudcrab will suffice for awhile. But, as soon as you get your first shack, you are ready anytime to roast that rat or nix hound you barely managed to bring down.
Book of first recipes is cheap at Arille's. Open it with a piece of paper in your inventory and you have your first grocery list. The grill and pan are available there also. And, if you want to pick out what you eat, grab the food satchel, too. Instead of having the "automatic" eating from your inventory (which you can still do as backup), you can drop the satchel on the ground, activate it, and then move whatever you wish to eat at that time into the satchel until it tells you, "you are no longer hungry". There is a campfire and bedroll available at Arille's, too, if you think you might be homeless for awhile. They are not especially expensive.
Then, as you travel the isle, you run into food traders and bakery shops which sell recipe ingredients and other cooking utensils. Book stores sell other recipe books for more variety, and pubs will sell you fabulous tisanes to help you. And, then there's the inviting Food Trade Route to provide additional goodies to save up for.
I've always had room for four or more cooked foods and a loaf of bread is cheaply bought until I locate an oven where I can cook my own.
The other thing I buy first (at Arille's) is a waterskin to carry drinks for when I'm thirsty. Every city or town has at least one well or fountain to refill it. And, all those empty bottle clutters? They can be filled with water at the nearest well, too. Or, even better, the various kegs hanging around tor color, almost always have wine or beer in them that you can fill those bottles and jugs with. If you don't want to drink those spirits yourself, they bring in a little handy coin to exchange for the ingredients you were needing the next time you are cooking. Or, you might sell three or four bottles of cheap wine to get that pot you can use (and watch) to make soups or puddings. Yum! There is even a good recipe for moon sugar. You don't need to encourage drug habits any more.
None of these things I mentioned above are available in other needs mods so far as I know. And, I sorely miss being able to see my food cooking when using needs mods in later games.
» Mon Nov 09, 2015 7:57 am 
