Poultry shears









Dry Vitamin E









Wusthof knives









Egg separator









Kitchen scale










Carlson salmon oil









Can-or-freeze pint size jars are awesome for storage

Pictorial

Here's how I do it. You don't have to do it like this. But folks who are new to this claim that seeing pictures eases their fear that mere mortals could not possibly be capable of something so daunting as making cat food. Believe me, I'm no whiz in the kitchen. Nor do I particularly cherish spending lots of time there. But making homemade cat food is something that's much more easily accomplished than you might think. It's certainly much easier than I thought it would be when I started this adventure.

Trust me. Everything's going to be okay.

Look at it this way: the so-called professionals who put those fancy labels on their cans and bags with AAFCO nutritional guarantees are the same ones who let tainted wheat and heaven knows what else get into food and poison thousands of cats and dogs in early 2007. And you know you can do much better than that.

1. Get out the grinder.


2. Assemble the non-meat ingredients.


3. Cut up the carcass (if using chicken, remove as much skin as possible).


4. Muscle meat from the carcass to be cut into chunks by hand (or ground using an extra-large grinding plate) is on the left, meaty bones to be ground on the right. See? This isn't really rocket science.


5. Chunk -- i.e., cut up -- a bunch of the muscle meat by hand (this is to give your cat something to chew on and get some good tooth and gum exercise) unless you choose to grind everything.


6. Weigh correct amount of organ meats (liver and chicken heart seen here). You still with me? Believe me, you can do this.


7. Now you have some "chunked" meat, plus the meaty bones and organs ready to grind. At this point, put all the meat and organs in the refrigerator until you mix up the rest of the ingredients.


  

8. Separate the eggs and add the yolks to the mix of dry ingredients and water. Mix it all together, adding the psyllium (if you're using it) last.


9. Whisk together the "slurry." The eerie bright-yellowish color comes from the B-complex and egg yolk. This mixture contains water, fresh egg yolk, salmon oil, a wee bit of kelp, a teensy bit of dulse, a glandular supplement, Vitamin E, psyllium, and B-complex. I also add some Taurine supplement to make up for possible lost Taurine in the meat and organs from freezing. This is no harder than mixing anything else in your kitchen. Except doing this creates what we like to call the 'elixir of cat life' so it's much more fun.


10. Now for the extraordinarily exciting part. Take the meaty bones and organ meats out of the refrigerator and grind. This isn't hard. You just put the meaty bones through a hole at the top and use the plunger to guide it through. This does not take long with an electric grinder.


11. Add the hand-chunked meat to the ground mixture and stir well, distributing evenly.


12. Add the "slurry" to that and mix again.


Finishing up . . .

13. Spoon the finished wonderful cat food into containers. Do not overfill. Leave at least a 1/2 inch gap or more at the top, because the food expands when frozen and you don't want the lids popping off. That would be a real drag.


  

14. Label the containers--with the type of meat and the date--and freeze.


That's all. You're done! It's that simple. Now go clean up your kitchen, serve up some food -- warm it in a baggie under warm water -- to your grateful cats, and go listen to some soothing Sinatra or John Prine or the Wailin' Jennys . Oh! Oh! Or even better, check out this amazingly creative and warm-hearted Artist. Whatever tickles your fancy. A great reward for yourself after a little time invested in your kitchen creating amazing food to help keep your deserving cat getting the fuel she needs to thrive.

Total time? Obviously, that depends on how fast you are. I've been making cat food for about seven years now and I have the process of making a batch that lasts two cats for about two weeks down to just about exactly one hour, including cleanup, taking out the trash, pausing for stretches humming John Prine songs, etc. Truth be told, since my husband joined the cat foodmaking staff a few years ago, together we whip out a batch or even two in 30 or 40 minutes together, particularly if we buy whole cut up chickens.

The family that makes cat food together stays together and spends a lot less time and money in veterinary clinics, so if you can get a helper, absolutely go for it. All of this is considerably less time than I used to spend fretting about my sick cat and continuously trekking him to the vet when he had a digestive disorder.

So yes, while it is definitely some work, it's most certainly very manageable. Think of it as a labor of love. Because really, that's exactly what it is.