Feast-Worthy or Flight of Fancy?

Our cats adore Fancy Feast cat meals. Like all tom cat Fancy Feast aficionados, they have got specific flavors and textures they insist on—for our kitties it’s the salmon paté and the meat paté.

Recently, a brand new line of Fancy Feast made it onto their “most wanted” checklist—Fancy Feast Petites, a small bundle of two single-serve, able to consume rainy meals foods for cats. These recipes—with components akin to “wild Alaskan salmon” and “braised chicken”—sound remarkably like one thing chances are you’ll consume your self. So, (naturally?) when Fancy Feast rolled out this new product, the cat meals corporate additionally issued a unfastened cookbook PDF for people: Petite Feast: A Cookbook, encouraged by way of the brand new formulation and described as “recipes for humans inspired by the exquisite, single-serve entrée cats love.”

But are those recipes mere flights of fancy, or actually feast-worthy? I determined to make one and percentage a meal with our grey tabby, Zoe, to determine.

Chicken or Fish?

While the idea that of cat food-inspired recipes for people sound less-than-appetizing, the theory used to be delivered to lifestyles with some notable names within the meals global. These come with cookbook writer and 2019 James Beard award-nominated meals blogger Jerrelle Guy, who runs the web site, Chocolate for Basil. Her cute, crosseyed, chonky tabby, Christopher, frequently serves because the taste-tester when she’s cooking.

Baker Josh Snyder (higher referred to as Eli on Days of Our Lives), who with spouse Angela Kinsey (the well-known cat girl on “The Office”) run the baking web site Baking With Josh and Ange, evolved recipes, too. The couple has two cats, Oreo and Snickers, who’re additionally it appears loopy about Fancy Feast.

The Petite Feast cookbook has 12 recipes: 5 that includes rooster, 5 that includes salmon, and two that includes whitefish. Not all of them map without delay onto a cat meals recipe, however some of them are nearer than others.

Recipes come with dishes akin to a Pistachio-Crusted Salmon and Jasmine Rice with Water Fried Egg Yolk, Sage Cornbread Chicken Pot Pie, and Ancho Butternut Squash Chicken Street Tacos.

I determined to make the recipe for Honey Sriracha Grilled Chicken with Spicy Fried Rice. Zoe would have the Grilled Chicken and Rice Entrée (for cats).

Read on for our assessment.

It’s excellent that my cats truly like Fancy Feast Petites cat meals, as a result of, wow, is it ever a ache to open the packaging. It is available in a two-pack pair of plastic bins which are joined by way of a foil quilt that snaps aside to split two, tiny 1.Four-ounce servings. Once the servings are separated, it’s a combat to peel again the stiff foil quilt to get the meals out of the container. (Confession: I most often surrender and use a pointy knife to carve a big opening within the foil in which I scoop out the cat meals.)

In protection of the unusual packaging: These small parts are superb if in case you have only one cat and you might be drained of having a refrigerator complete of half-filled cans of chilly cat meals. Purina will get best marks for giving us those tiny parts of deliciousness. But as any individual with rather a couple of cats, looking to pry again the ones foil covers on a couple of tiny bins whilst hungry cats circle my ankles…Let’s simply say that I’m obviously no longer the objective target market for those mini foods.

Once you get it within the dish, the grilled rooster cat meals appears to be like appetizing and precisely like what it’s: chopped-up rooster in a rooster broth gravy, with rice. (The different components come with liver, rice, different proteins, minerals, nutrients, and taurine.)

I liked that it doesn’t have the sturdy odor frequently related to cat meals. This lack of smell didn’t appear to deter Zoe. She dove proper in and I needed to transfer truly rapid with the digital camera sooner than her lunch vanished. Zoe didn’t watch for me to sit down down with my dish to sign up for her. Cats don’t have any desk manners.

Review of Honey Sriracha Grilled Chicken with Spicy Fried Rice (for People)

Preparing this rooster and rice dish used to be no longer as simple as opening a container, and under no circumstances as fast.

To get started, of route, my rooster used to be uncooked and I needed to marinate it for 2 hours in a yummy marinade of honey, oil, sriracha, salt, and pepper.

The rice additionally needed to be cooked after which saved within the fridge (chilly rice makes the most productive fried rice—and I unfold mine out on a tray, exposed, to dry it out a little bit whilst it chilled).

Two hours later, with the rooster marinated and the rice chilled, I used to be able to prepare dinner. First the fried rice. Surprisingly, the recipe mentioned to prepare dinner the scrambled egg on its own and set it apart sooner than sautéing aromatics (garlic, ginger, inexperienced onion) and including the rice (with peas, sriracha, salt, and pepper to crisp). You unload the cooked egg, in conjunction with soy sauce and a little bit of sesame oil, in on the finish.

Once the rice used to be lined and put aside, I tossed the marinated rooster at the grill, five or 6 mins to a facet. Sliced and arrayed at the rice, right here you’ve gotten it:

Which one’s mine? Hint: I garnished mine with further sriracha.

Of route, by the point I sat all the way down to consume, Zoe, and her meal of rooster and rice, had been lengthy long past.

But my lunch used to be excellent sufficient that I’ve since ready the dish for visitors (who had been greater than stunned to be told they had been consuming Fancy Feast).

Further Reading