The latest cookbook sensation is... a lizard?!

It seems like everyone is jumping on the cookbook craze lately. These days you can find or order cookbooks written by everyone from racing driver & TV presenter married couple Romain & Marion Grosjean to former WWE personality Renee Paquette to our very own James May! This latest exponent of the cookbook however is a little bit different from the rest of them. Lenny, the inspiration behind "Chef Lenny: Cooking for Humans", is a one year old bearded dragon. Yes, that's right. He's a lizard.

"Chef Lenny: Cooking for Humans" was the brainchild of 37 year old mother of three Valerie Musser, a chef and lizard lover who hails from Redmond, Washington. She ran a catering business before the pandemic hit and instead of letting herself get down in the dumps during the pandemic, she decided to channel those two things she really loves (food and reptiles of the lizard variety) into a fun quarantine project. This quarantine project is what eventually became Cooking for Humans. The book is a real gem, filled with brilliant photos of Lenny wearing a tiny chef's hat posing in cooking-related poses with minature versions of the book's recipies. All the recipies are inspired by the food Musser finds the most comforting.

"I'd been writing a cookbook for about 10 years but never really had the time to sit down and sort through it... With quarantine I found myself with a surplus of time." explained Musser in an interview she conducted with Metro. "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. He loves to be in the kitchen, it’s his favourite room in the house, so it worked out. " As to why Musser decided to base the recipies in the book around comfort food, she said that she wanted everything to be "authentic recipes like you would eat at your grandma’s house. Good, quality, wholesome food like chicken pot pie, blueberry muffins and tacos. "

Perhaps more importantly though, Musser feels that Lenny's cookbook will be something uplifting in these very odd and uncertain times. "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 realized that people actually needed this. During the throes of Covid everything was so negative and scary, so I wanted to make something truly funny and uplifting. "

Out of all the oddities and curiosities 2020 has given us, Chef Lenny has definitely been one of the most entertaining! He's a naturally photogenic lizard in his diminutive chef's hat and, who knows, maybe it's the start of a very successful culinary career for him!