Thanks Chris! We did want to have other ways to collect items than the combat, the functionality wouldn't have taken more than 20 minutes to implement, but to say the final few days of development were packed would be an understatement lol.
For the tomato sauce recipe, you need to talk to Boca on the left side of the map at the campfire. All of the recipes are obtained from the NPCs, but unfortunately again from time constraints we weren't able to add anything like "Got Recipe!" so it can be confusing. It just shows up in your recipes list.
I think I'll update our description with a bit of explanation on how to progress if you get stuck. Thanks for the feedback! And good luck on your games as well!