@NRowe I really like your solution with asking Sabrina to cook. That way the story goal was achieved, but the sims had no unfair longterm advantage. And now they have a new contact in the world, it's perfect, actually, because it happened so organically.
Another thing that came to mind is that I sometimes "cheat" with screenshots. Sometimes the order things happened in gameplay isn't ideal, so I change the filenames to sort them differently. Like merging two mountain expeditions to make them look like a single one. (Expedition A had two sims in and one of this duo was also part of Expedition B, so it fit. I only had to delete a couple where the weather didn't fit.)
I mean, when I look back at my pictures months/years later, I want to be entertained.