With cooking, a lot of the time you WILL NOT FINISH IT. You still get proficiency for partly cooked fish. Just keep getting prof until it's easier to cook them.

Alls good now, after reading the comments I understood the turn based part, thanks everyone

The formula behind this is systematically imbalanced to my mind. Takes much too long to skill up, no matter how you click.
I pm'ed "njaguar" abut this with a decent analysis and he never responded. Forget this part of the game, it is not even worth skilling up fishing / cooking.
Sometimes I think he wants the parts dead he can't make fg's with - balanced fishing could make you quite independent from changing gear that much with the different characters.