In this article you will discover the best ways to level up your Cooking skills in Cataclysm. This article will focus on the high end levels (450-525) so if you are curious about the best way to level before then I suggest that you level Fishing and Cooking at the same time as it's a lot easier than just farming meat and trying to cook it.
Leveling from 450-525
The easiest and fastest way to level your Cooking for these levels is to fish for your materials. Of course if you have a lot of gold you can afford to spend you can just buy a lot of meat on the Auction House and not spend any time collecting your materials. For most people, however, fishing will be the best bet for getting your materials as it is a lot faster than grinding for meat.
It's important to note that you can not level from 450-525 with any recipes besides the ones that are bought from a vendor with Chef's Awards. This means that you will need to complete Cooking Dailies in either Stormwind or Orgrimmar, depending on whether or not you are Horde or Alliance. These dailies are very easy to complete but you only get 1-2 Chef's Awards per daily so it will take you several days to get all the recipes you need since you'll need to buy at least three recipes to level up to 525 (this is true wherever you level with meats or fish).
The recipes that you purchase to level up with are really up to you, since you can decide where you want to fish. You will need to buy one recipe at 450, another recipe at 475, and finally your last recipe required for leveling at 500. So all you need to do really is to be mindful and purchase a new recipe at each of those levels. It's simple.