Hello,

I'm now totally spooked from all the recalls, so I'd like to start
making home-cooked food for my cats. I'm looking for recipes for
supplements to add to cooked meat. The key word here being "cooked".

I know this much: if you're cooking meat for a cat, then they won't
get calcium or taurine. You can't feed a cat cooked bones, so you
have to add calcium. And I believe the cooking destroys the taurine,
so you have to add that back into the food. The problem is, I don't
know how *much* to add. I've seen recipes for supplements to add to
raw diets, but I wouldn't just swipe those and use them in cooked
food, which probably requires different supplements or different
proportions of ingredients.

I also don't want to buy a commercial supplement prepared especially
for cats. The reason is that animal food doesn't have the same
regulation or quality control that human food has. This is what I'm
trying to get away from! What I want to do is buy the necessary
ingredients, all of which are human-grade, and prepare the mix
myself. So I need a recipe.

What I've discovered in my research is that there are two camps of
people who make food for their cats. One group is the people who are
highly knowledgeable about cat nutrition, who know exactly what
supplements to add to the food, and who feed only raw meat diets to
their cats. They grind up raw muscle meat with raw bone, and make
sure the cats get heart meat for taurine, and then add some vitamin
supplements to make up for body parts the cat might not be getting.
All well and good if you want to feed raw meat. But I don't have a
meat grinder and I don't want to run out and invest hundreds of
dollars in equipment, when I've never even done this before. Isn't
there a way to start slowly? Go from canned food to cooked meat, and
then, maybe, to raw meat? One step at a time.

There are people who cook food for their cats, but those recipes
always seem to include grains and vegetables, which cats don't need,
and they don't talk about calcium, taurine, vitamin, or fiber
supplements at all. Some recipes I've seen even have all these weird
spices, like paprika, which I see no reason to give to a cat! I get
the feeling that these people have no idea what they're doing, and I
don't trust their recipes at all.

What I can't find is a well-thought-out recipe of supplements, that I
can make myself, that is meant to go with *cooked* meat. I know
cooked meat is not considered the very best way of feeding a cat by
the top cat nutritionists, but it's still miles better than
commercial canned food, which my cats have been living on for years.
So I'd be going in the right direction!

To recap:

I am looking for a recipe for a dietary supplement, made of 100%
human-grade ingredients that I can buy at a health food store, which
will satisfy a cat's nutritional needs when used with cooked meat.
Can someone help? Either with a recipe, or with pointers to good
sites (that don't focus totally on raw meat)?

Thank you!! And hi to my RPCA buddies who are reading here. :)

Joyce