WoWhead is really useful for this sort of thing. Here's a list of every cooking recipe in the game, sorted by skill required to cook it. Note that the list displays the skill levels at which the Recipe goes Orange, Yellow, Green, and eventually Grey.
To level cooking between 289 and 300, when, as Dongorath noted, a variety of recipes open up, If you're leveling fishing concurrently, you have lots of options. Try some of these:
- Baked Salmon - Recipe purchased from one of two vendors in Feralas
- Lobster Stew - Recipe purchased from one of two vendors in Feralas
- Mightfish Steak - Offers a Stamina buff as well as health. Bought from the same Feralas vendors.
- There are several recipes such as Poached Sunscale Salmon, which won't get you all the way to 300, but are green from 289 to 295. Check the Wowhead list for others.
If you absolutely cannot stand fishing and don't want to buy fish from the AH, you have two options that will see you through to 300:
- Runn Tim Tuber Surprise - the recipe drops in Dire Maul, as does the required ingredient. Also offers an Intellect buff, nice for spellcasters.
- Smoked Desert Dumplings - Quest reward from Cenarion Hold in Silithus, offers a substantial Strength buff that's nice for the leveling Warrior, Death Knight or Paladin.
Another option is Clamlette Magnifique - the recipe is a quest reward from Clamlette Surprise in Gadgetzan - a quest which was once required to advance beyond 225 cooking. It's easy to miss now that it's no longer required, but it's notable because it requires an extremely common and cheap ingredient (Zesty Clam Meat), offers a universally useful Attack Power and Spell Power buff, and most importantly, is green all the way to 300.
Finally, if you don't mind waiting until November, the in-game Harvest Festival (which occurs around Thanksgiving in the US) will offer you the opportunity to learn to cook Slow-Roasted Turkey, along with making available the unique (only found during the holiday) ingredients required for it in abundance. The Turkey recipe is notable in that it will keep giving skillups for a full 75 points, from 280, all the way to a whopping 355, allowing you to nearly completely skip Outland recipes and cooking. This can be handy for a high level player power leveling the skill after the fact, as some of the Outland meat and fish can be a pain to farm.
Check this list of instances by level if you need to know information about instances in the future.
The lowest level instance for the Alliance race is Deadmines, often called DM or VC (Boss: VanCleef).
The suggested level for this instance is 15 - 21, the minimal level is 10.
So, it's best to level a bit further, the dungeon will then be available in the dungeon finder and allow you to teleport there instead of going through a lot of transport. At a lower level, it's unlikely that you will be able to reach the entrance. Even at the minimal level, it's unlikely that you will be able to reach the boss properly. Unless you take a very high level with you...
Best Answer
In order to queue for ashran, you must go to warspear/stormshield and remain in that town until you are accepted into the queue. Usually the queue is fairly short, and you could farm artifacts in pve while you wait outside the city on the beach (this may have been removed, they seemed to be not dropping last I checked).