We know cookbooks for people who love animals, but are you familiar with an animal that has its own cookbook for humans? Well, chef Leonard Patrick aka Lenny is one.
Patrick is a one-year-old central bearded dragon that can be seen with tiny pots of soup, miniature biscuits, and dinky cheeses in his debut book Chef Lenny: cooking for humans.
The cookbook was the brainchild of his owner Valerie Musser, a chef and lizard lover from Redmond in Washington.
Chef Lenny: cooking for humans is not a book full of recipes only lizards will enjoy, but meal ideas for humans that will inspire one to get in the kitchen.
In an interview with Metro, Musser said it was her quarantine project. She has been writing a cookbook for about 10 years but never had the time to sit down and sort through it. With quarantine, she found herself with a surplus of time.
“The idea to make it about Lenny came because I’d bought him a little chef’s hat from Etsy and he actually loves wearing hats and posing for photos, so I started making miniature food for him to show off with, she said. ”He loves to be in the kitchen, it’s his favourite room in the house, so it worked out.
“Every miniature meal in the book is real food, inspired by my favourite comforting dishes. It’s kind of who I am as a person in lizard form. It’s authentic recipes like you would eat at your grandma’s house. Good, quality, wholesome food like chicken pot pie, blueberry muffins, and tacos. Initially, I posted a few pictures of Lenny cooking on Instagram and the feedback was so positive, people were writing things like, ’this made my day’ and ’this really cheered me up’. So, I realised that people actually needed this. During the throes of Covid-19, everything was so negative and scary, so I wanted to make something truly funny and uplifting.
“It turns out that Lenny is perfectly suited to being a chef. He is very pretentious. His body language is kind of crazy, he wants what he wants, he’s very demanding and he’s kind of a snob about food, very fussy, so this project fits him very well. If he doesn’t like something he’ll glare at you, he likes to be hand-fed, he will not eat out of a dish. We have another lizard with a totally different personality, he’s very chilled, but Lenny is a very haughty and spoiled little lizard man.
“They are very expressive creatures, they can dream and have nightmares and they use their body language to convey their feelings, they’ll change their colouring if they are angry or cold and if the tips of their scales go orange, it means they are super happy. So, we can always tell when Lenny is pleased to be in the kitchen.”