These days, the descriptions of certain gourmet cat foods sound appetizing enough to make your own mouth water.
Case in point: Petites, Fancy Feast’s new line of cat food products, which includes “Grilled Chicken Entrée with Rice in Gravy,” “Seared Salmon Entrée with Spinach in Gravy,” and “Ocean Whitefish Entrée with Tomato in Gravy.” While the food itself probably won’t appeal to you, the idea of sitting down to a dinner of seared salmon and spinach just might. So, as Food & Wine reports, Purina has released a digital cookbook to help you make human versions of each meal.
Petite Feast: A Cookbook [PDF] has 12 recipes in total—five with chicken, five with salmon, and two with whitefish. Ten of them were developed by Amanda Hassner, an official Fancy Feast cat food chef, but two recipes were submitted by guest chefs. Jerrelle Guy, a James Beard Award-nominated chef and author of the cookbook Black Girl Baking, contributed “Salmon Cappelletti in a Cream and Spinach Sauce,” which even covers instructions for making the pasta from scratch. Guy’s cat, Christopher, helps taste-test recipes for her site Chocolate for Basil.
If you’re looking for something more on the sweet-and-sour side, you might prefer “Honey Sriracha Grilled Chicken with Spicy Fried Rice,” created by actor Josh Snyder. When he’s not dreaming up recipes for cat food-inspired cookbooks, he stays busy with Baking with Josh & Ange, the baking website he runs with wife Angela Kinsey (best known for playing The Office’s biggest cat enthusiast, Angela Martin). They have two cats, Oreo and Snickers.
Most of the recipes aren’t too similar to their source material. The only thing Hassner’s “Roasted Salmon with Spiced French Toast, Cardamom Carrots and Maple Rosemary Sauce” has in common with the corresponding Petite dish, for example, is salmon. But feel free to tell your cat that you’re eating the same thing—there’s a very slim chance they’ll argue (with words, at least).