Cooking for Two: Your Cat and You!

[Roxabelle]

Ok, so the title of this thread is pinched from a cookbook I own. It contains all sorts of purrfecly cat-friendly meals, and ways to adapt them so that you can enjoy dinner with your cat.

Sinclair is still only 3 months old, but this is something I did many times with Atari. My other half would go out for a curry with the boys and I'd cook a meal for myself and the cat

Do you cook meals for your cat that you both share?

 

[daftcat75]

As cute as that sounds, none of those recipes are appropriate for a cat. Amazon has a Table Of Contents preview.

Meat, bones, and organs. That's what a cat eats. But you don't want to cook bones because they can splinter. So bones are often replaced with a calcium supplement in cat food. Other vitamins and minerals don't survive processing, cooking, storage, transportation as well, like taurine, so those are supplemented too. It takes care and a recipe to create nutritionally balanced and adequate food for a cat. Meat alone would result in deficiencies and anything that isn't meat, bones (or calcium supplement), and organs has the possibility of creating discomfort, imbalance, toxicity, or disease.

Cats aren't omnivores like humans and dogs. They have much lower amounts of amylase--carbohydrate-digesting enzymes--making plant-based ingredients like starches, grains, fruits, and vegetables potentially problematic. They also lack the enzymes to utilize certain plant-based nutrients like beta-carotene, a vitamin A precursor, or plant-based omega 3's. What's good for a person or a dog does not necessarily apply for a cat. So while your cat may seem to enjoy some of those recipes, they aren't necessarily good for him.

If you want to cook a treat for your cat, stick with unseasoned meat. And keep it within his treat budget (less than 10% of his total food), to prevent nutritional imbalances. When I was still making raw food (following a recipe from Feline Nutrition) for my Krista, I would often cut up a small piece of the meat into "turkey sashimi" or "rabbit sashimi". This serving was about the size of a nickel. But that was more than enough to please my kitty.

 

[Kat0121]

The girls share my meals often. I will roast a piece of meat like chicken or turkey and they have a share. They love steak too. Especially Sophie. It's her very favorite. Lily loves turkey thigh meat best. I don't season it. If I decide I want seasoning on mine, I add it after I have given them their portion. They only get the meat during our shared meal.

 

[Roxabelle]

The girls share my meals often. I will roast a piece of meat like chicken or turkey and they have a share. They love steak too. Especially Sophie. It's her very favorite. Lily loves turkey thigh meat best. I don't season it. If I decide I want seasoning on mine, I add it after I have given them their portion. They only get the meat during our shared meal.

That’s what I do. Generally speaking my cats will eat their own cat food as their main source of nutrition - it’s not like I’m cooking up a whole mackerel and vegetable sides for a cat! They just have a tiny morsel if unseasoned meat/fish that I’m cooking.

 

[Kat0121]

That’s what I do. Generally speaking my cats will eat their own cat food as their main source of nutrition - it’s not like I’m cooking up a whole mackerel and vegetable sides for a cat! They just have a tiny morsel if unseasoned meat/fish that I’m cooking.

My Sophie likes steak so much she tried to steal one from my plate. I had a rib eye and I was letting it rest before cutting into it to get their share of course. She jumped up on the desk and grabbed a corner of it. I noticed her out of the corner of my eye. She couldn't lift it so she dropped it and started hollering at me.

They have sniffed around at vegetables before. Not interested at all.

 

[denice]

Alice doesn't care too much for people food and neither did Patches. She will have a little nibble of chicken or turkey and that is about it. They would both come running when I opened a can of tuna and they would each have a bit of that. Since Patches has gone to the bridge Alice hasn't done that. I guess she just did it because Patches did and she wasn't going to allow Patches to have something that she didn't get to have.