Short and sweet

By admin on February 28th, 2010. 1 Comment.

This is going to be quick an dirty. Dusty ate! Don’t get too excited, she still won’t touch raw meat with a 10 foot pole, but at least she ate something solid other than pureed carrots today. This is not the best thing you could feed your cat but I am posting the recipe for those of you who have finicky cats like Dusty. Here it goes:

Ingredients:

1 cup cooked chicken
1/2 cup cooked rice
1/2 cup pureed carrots
1/2 cup peas
1/2 cup home made chicken broth

Mix all ingredients together, serve at room temperature. I used my Magic Bullet to chop it all up so it has the texture of the canned food she is so hooked on. Of course, for even more finicky felines, you can top this with something they love. Dusty likes nutritional yeast flakes or wild salmon oil. Another preferred topping for finicky transitioning cats is their old canned food.

I would not feed this to a cat for too long as it’s missing all sorts of nutrients (for example Taurine, which was destroyed in the cooking process – but you can always sprinke some on top if you wish).

One amazing thing I could not do without during Dusty’s transition as well as Bruce’s digestive issues, is the home made chicken broth. I read this recipe in Anitra Frazier’s The Natural Cat.

Ingredients:

3-4 lbs cooked chicken (baked, fried, or broiled) Anitra prefers well done thighs, I have used whole roasted chicken and baked legs
water

Put the well-cooked chicken into a soup pot large enough so the chicken fills the pot less than half way. Cover with water until water is one to two inches above the chicken. Cover the pot loosely (tip the lid). Bring to a low simmer. Simmer five to eight hours, occasionally breaking up the chicken and adding more water whenever necessary. (You can do other things while it simmers). During the last hour, remove the lid and let the water cook down until the chicken is barely covered. Broth is now deliciously strong. Pour off broth and cool to room temperature, leaving the mass of chicken in the pot.
While the broth is cooling, pour enough cold water over the chicken left in the pot to cover. Then let cool some more until it’s cool enough for you to be able to touch. With your hands, knead, squeeze, and stir the chicken around in the water to get all the good stuff out of the meat and into the water. The water will begin to look milky. Finally, take the bones out and discard, take handfuls of chicken meat, wring out the liquid into the pot, and throw the meat away. (The hours of simmering have succeeded in transferring all usable nutrients from the meat into the broth. What little nutrition is left in the meat at this point would be largely indigestible).

To this, I add nutritional yeast flakes to make it more nutritious. So, when Dusty decides she’d rather skip a meal, I make sure she drinks at least 1/4 cup of this delicious broth. I also add this instead of water, to the raw diet of all the other cats.

Til next time!