Feast-Worthy or Flight of Fancy?

Our cats adore Fancy Feast cat food. Like all feline Fancy Feast aficionados, they’ve explicit flavors and textures they insist on—for our kitties it’s the salmon paté and the meat paté.

Just lately, a brand new line of Fancy Feast made it onto their “most wished” listing—Fancy Feast Petites, a small bundle of two single-serve, able to eat moist meals meals for cats. These recipes—with elements comparable to “wild Alaskan salmon” and “braised hen”—sound remarkably like one thing you may eat your self. So, (naturally?) when Fancy Feast rolled out this new product, the cat meals firm additionally issued a free cookbook PDF for people: Petite Feast: A Cookbook, impressed by the brand new formulation and described as “recipes for people impressed by the beautiful, single-serve entrée cats love.”

However are these recipes mere flights of fancy, or actually feast-worthy? I made a decision to make one and share a meal with our grey tabby, Zoe, to seek out out.

Rooster or Fish?

Whereas the idea of cat food-inspired recipes for people sound less-than-appetizing, the thought was delivered to life with some notable names within the meals world. These embrace cookbook writer and 2019 James Beard award-nominated meals blogger Jerrelle Man, who runs the web site, Chocolate for Basil. Her lovely, crosseyed, chonky tabby, Christopher, typically serves because the taste-tester when she’s cooking.

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

The Petite Feast cookbook has 12 recipes: 5 that includes hen, 5 that includes salmon, and two that includes whitefish. Not all of them map straight onto a cat meals recipe, however a few of them are nearer than others.

Recipes embrace dishes comparable to a Pistachio-Crusted Salmon and Jasmine Rice with Water Fried Egg Yolk, Sage Cornbread Rooster Pot Pie, and Ancho Butternut Squash Rooster Road Tacos.

I made a decision to make the recipe for Honey Sriracha Grilled Rooster with Spicy Fried Rice. Zoe would have the Grilled Rooster and Rice Entrée (for cats).

Learn on for our evaluate.

It’s good that my cats actually 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 containers which can be joined by a foil cowl that snaps aside to separate two, tiny 1.4-ounce servings. As soon as the servings are separated, it’s a battle to peel again the stiff foil cowl to get the meals out of the container. (Confession: I often quit and use a pointy knife to carve a big opening within the foil via which I scoop out the cat meals.)

In protection of the unusual packaging: These small parts are fantastic when you have only one cat and you might be uninterested in having a fridge stuffed with half-filled cans of chilly cat meals. Purina will get prime marks for giving us these tiny parts of deliciousness. However as somebody with fairly just a few cats, making an attempt to pry again these foil covers on a number of tiny containers whereas hungry cats circle my ankles…Let’s simply say that I’m clearly not the target market for these mini meals.

When you get it within the dish, the grilled hen cat meals seems to be appetizing and precisely like what it’s: chopped-up hen in a hen broth gravy, with rice. (The opposite elements embrace liver, rice, different proteins, minerals, nutritional vitamins, and taurine.)

I appreciated that it doesn’t have the sturdy odor typically related to cat meals. This lack of odor didn’t appear to discourage Zoe. She dove proper in and I needed to transfer actually quick with the digital camera earlier than her lunch vanished. Zoe didn’t watch for me to take a seat down with my dish to hitch her. Cats haven’t any desk manners.

Overview of Honey Sriracha Grilled Rooster with Spicy Fried Rice (for Folks)

Making ready this hen and rice dish was not as simple as opening a container, and positively not as fast.

To begin, in fact, my hen was 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 effective fried rice—and I unfold mine out on a tray, uncovered, to dry it out a bit whereas it chilled).

Two hours later, with the hen marinated and the rice chilled, I used to be able to prepare dinner. First the fried rice. Surprisingly, the recipe stated to prepare dinner the scrambled egg by itself and set it apart earlier than sautéing aromatics (garlic, ginger, inexperienced onion) and including the rice (with peas, sriracha, salt, and pepper to crisp). You dump the cooked egg, together with soy sauce and a little bit of sesame oil, in on the finish.

As soon as the rice was coated and put aside, I tossed the marinated hen on the grill, 5 or 6 minutes to a facet. Sliced and arrayed on the rice, right here you will have it:

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

After all, by the point I sat right down to eat, Zoe, and her meal of hen and rice, have been lengthy gone.

However my lunch was adequate that I’ve since ready the dish for company (who have been greater than shocked to study they have been consuming Fancy Feast).

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