The Sims 3

To get the achievement, prepare a meal of perfect quality. takuto neko notes that this must be as you create it: you cannot create a less-than-perfect meal and then 'kick it up a notch'.

There are several factors which affect the quality of a meal that your sims can prepare.

1. Cooking skill
You can improve your cooking skill by reading cooking book available from the library and bookshop, watching the cookery channel on tv, and by actually cooking!

2. Appliance Quality
The more expensive, the better. In buy mode, each appliance tells you the quality of that item. Note that if a sim has high repair skills, you can improve some kitchen appliances to result in better food.

3. Traits
The 'Natural Cook' trait and the 'Perfectionist' trait.
If trying for this achievement with a new sim, choose these traits. You can also use the lifetime reward 'Mid-life Crisis' to re-choose your traits.

4. Skill Challenges
Menu Maven is an easy enough challenge to complete. Simply have your sim watch the cooking channel whenever possible. As well as improving the cooking skill level, you will pick up recipes from time to time. You need to max out the cooking skill to learn the last recipe. Any recipes you don't learn from the cooking channel you can also buy from the bookshop.

5. Practice
The more a sim prepares a meal, the better they get at making it. Simply have your sim only ever cook one kind of meal for each mealtime, and they should get better at it eventually.

6. Ingredient Quality
For the meals that you can provide ingredients for (see in-game skill journal) the higher the quality of ingredients will result in higher quality food.
If you use normal quality apples to make apple pancakes, it will be of a lesser quality than one made with perfect quality apples. Having a sim with the gardening skill to provide ingredients may be a good idea.

Here's the order of the descriptive words used to describe the quality of food:
Normal
Nice
Very Nice
Great
Excellent
Outstanding
Perfect

Here's how to find out what level your recipes are currently at:
Hit 'X' to open up the skills list. Scroll down to Cooking and hit 'A' to open the skills journal. Tab across to the right to 'Recipes Known' with the LS. Here it shows you all the recipes you've made, and their quality. Hit 'Y' and change the list order to 'quality'. Scroll to the bottom to find your best quality recipe so far. Choose something from the bottom of the list (highest quality) and keep making that item to improve the quality. It'll improve in quality quicker than if you choose something that you can only make at 'normal quality', for instance.

Also, I think your mood might have an affect - it does with other skills such as writing and painting (changes the value of the things you create; higher mood = higher sell value), so it might be a good idea to practice when they're in a good mood. I like to practice when they have a few good moodlets, and put the stereo onto their favourite music channel to give them a mood boost too.

I got my achievement with the Lobster, and had to make it about 4 times before the achievement popped. My character had a level 10 cooking skill, and didn't have the Natural Cook trait. I didn't bother buying any perfect ingredients, I just bought 'from the fridge' each time and still got the achievement.

ok this is what happened to me.......i have the trait Natural cook, my cooking skill is 10, i have the most expensive oven and then randomly the achievement popped when i cooked a perfect French toast so my suggestion

Have the trait - Natural Cook, you can also change traits using the lifetime reward "mid life crisis"

cooking level - 10

Get the most expensive oven

Then just keep making French toast

hope this helps because it totally happened to me at random :)