How do you win the cooking festival in harvest moon ds?

1. Ship 10 Dishes Every Day for a Month

This will permanently double the sell value of any food item you can cook (except for bread and cheese). Be sure to start about a month in advance.

2. Raise Your Animals' Stats

Animal Products with higher stats sell for more money. It's easy to get your chicken's and cow's stats up, but your cats and dogs only level up once. Feed your cats treats whenever you can, starting from when you first get them, and take your dogs for walks every day. Even if you don't go anywhere, take a step or two, save, load, repeat. Their exercise hearts will go up really quickly.

3. Don't Cook Until the Week of the Festival

The only things that matter for dishes are their sell price and rarity. There's no freshness modifier (like in real cooking games). Dishes take a maximum of 48 hours to cook (if you're going for max rarity), so save them until the week of the contest; you'll never have too much space because once the cooking contest ends, they sell for their usual price. I think the cooking festival is always on either the 1st of the winter, spring, or fall or a date just a couple of days after. So I make sure to ship out dishes until the 25th of the previous season.

4. Stock Up on Ingredients

I don't suggest buying many things during the festival (unless you're going to sell them right back or use them in something you'll sell before the festival ends). Buying things raises the price of other goods for sale. Instead, buy whatever you're going to need ahead of time. You'll likely know your winning dishes before the contest starts, so keep an eye out for ingredients for your dishes when shopping throughout the month of shipping your dishes.

5. Plan Your Meals

Since you'll be cooking so much, be sure that your meals aren't too costly. You'll be going through food faster than usual and buying more meals than you normally do will hurt your pocketbook a bit. I ate a lot of grilled fish during the dishes shipping month and the week of the cooking contest.

6. Cook High Rarity Dishes

Higher rarity dishes sell for more money. Be sure to keep your recipe book up to date. Once you've maxed your affection with most of the villagers, you'll have access to the highest level recipes. For best results, check out the Recipe Guide on Gamefaqs.

7. Cook Everything

If you're serious about winning and the prize, cook everything. Even milk bread and cheese! Your dishes will sell best at the cooking contest if they're all unique. Each unique recipe will sell the first time you enter it into the contest. After that, it's worth 1% of its original value (unless it's rare; rarity is unchanged no matter how many times it's entered). You'll only lose out on the prizes given for first-time entries, but you'll win by a landslide because everything you enter will be worth a lot.

8. Sell What Doesn't Win

If you've cooked 12 recipes and only 10 can be entered, sell the other 2. There's no reason to keep them.

9. Take a Nap and Make Sure Your Stamina is Full

You're going to be doing a lot of cooking (30 dishes at a time) so make sure you've got enough stamina.

10. Talk to Villagers and Enter the Cooking Festival

Talk to anyone before you enter the festival. Even though I won it once when someone was right in front of me, sometimes when you approach one of the festival contestants, they'll step out of your way. If they're in front of you, you won't be able to enter the cooking festival.