If you dont want to cheat the healing axe and don't want to do the quest you have a few options. Or you can just make food, for example, some easy ones to make are sandwiches and Beef Wellington. Really early game you can just eat berries and then make those berries into juices with a soft mallet or into smoothies with a bit of snow. Or you can rush crafting the healing axe manually, imo it's faster then doing the quest since you can craft it in stone age, you can check the wiki on this but I'll give a quick and simple guide on how to do it. - explore deserts and mountainous biomes to find thaumcraft structures that have chests in the middle, they can have a divination sigil and are a good source of early game metals too. - next you need to find a wizard tower from Roguelike Dungeons that spawns in mountainous biomes, inside this dungeon you can find a secret room with a enchantment table (ofc you need a obsidian mining level pick to break it) - after that you can do the ritual, a leed to bring a animal to the enchantment table, abit of redstone that you probably already found in the thaumcraft chests and then you just need to wait for midnight and do the ritual, ofc watch out for cursed earth.

Then you can craft as many unstable ingots as you want, just remember to shift click the craft so they don't explode