Hi again Jackstin. Glad you were able to make some progress! I wanted to offer you a few more tips in case they are helpful:
1) Only one of the four Plateau shrines will require you to be warm to get to it. There is another way to reach one of the two shrines in or near the cold area.
2) Make sure when cooking with ingredients you use a cookpot to get their buffs. If you cook them on the fire, you'll get more hearts but no buffs. If you mix buffs (like a heat-resisting ingredient with a defense-increasing ingredient) you will get neither effect. Also, it is not a requirement you cook with multiple kinds of ingredients. Cooking with peppers only for example will still give you the effects of the peppers.
3) Basically, what ridley182 said. Certain ingredients grow where you would environmentally expect them to. If you need to find more peppers, for example, they may be around the base of the chillier area. The "grows where you'd expect" aspect will be useful to you in exploring the game. Also, the Old Man has a place where he leaves some food laying around, that may be of use to you.
4) The lit stick will help keep you warm but will make it hard to do much else while you're holding it. So you may find it useful to use the other ingredients as well.
I hope exploration becomes more interesting to you when you get off the Plateau. I know it did for us. I also find much of the fun of exploration is in finding Koroks and finding interesting shrines, gear or people, so, perhaps you will enjoy that aspect too.
I was really surprised to learn that also. It's also amazing when you come across a salesperson 100+ hours in selling items you thought you could only get in the wild.(raw meat salesman who walks by Dueling Peaks stable)
Yeah I quickly realised I'd need to do cooking! Haha. Worked out how to light the pot but couldn't work out how to use the cook pot. Had to look it up online. I feel like the selecting items to hold isn't a very intuitive system but the cooking made sense.
I'm glad you told me that one items effects would overwrite another's. I don't know how I would have realised otherwise. I tried cooking a pepper and something else, went into the cold area and died.
I am enjoying this game more now, but I think from all the reviews I was expecting something where if you could imagine you could do it, you can. Instead it seems to be a game where there is lots of cool stuff to do but it isn't necessarily intuitive so you have to trial and error/experiment as a result. For example I liked that you could shoot down ropes to make a platform fall, but was disapppinted that I couldn't chop down the wood struts to make the platform collapse. Maybe I was expecting too much.