Cooking, shopping, and cats

[redbird]

I just cooked us a nice simple dinner: lamb patties, basmati rice, and cucumber. (Just peeled and sliced, no salad dressing or anything.) The lamb patty recipe is ground lamb, cumin, ginger, and scallion or plausible substitute (tonight that was a shallot). A while ago, in researching something else, cattitude discovered that onions may be bad for cats--not at a chocolate or aspirin level of bad, but not good. So we try not to feed julian_tiger onions.

The boy is eager, persuasive, and omnivorous. So of course he got some cucumber. But I also set aside a little bit of the meat before I mixed the shallot in, and cooked Julian his own miniature lamb patty. It wasn't much extra trouble, but it's not something I'd done for any other cat. (For humans, of course: I seldom buy mushrooms, and don't cook with them when Cattitude his home.)

And while the meal was cooking, I got out the milk (for Cattitude), and Julian looked interested, so I poured a bit into his bowl. (It started the day as our yogurt bowl.) He often gets a bit of milk when I put some in tea.

I've taken to choosing ice cream flavors in part based on cat-suitability. Hence, less chocolate or something-and-chocolate than I otherwise would.

I didn't do this for Artemis. Julian is persuasive, and eager. Artemis probably could have had yogurt, had she asked: though I didn't get into the yogurt-every-morning routine when she was a young cat. It was already in place when Julian moved in. He'll even remind me, if the morning gets along and he hasn't had any yogurt yet, that I should get it out, and we should have yogurt. (This is a good thing.) Somehow, it was easier to just tell Artemis "No, you don't get any of this" when it was chocolate ice cream than it is with Julian: it's possible with him, but he needs to be told over and over until the bowl is empty, and then I have to rinse it out or he'll either jump up or pull it off whatever surface it's on.

Comments

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

Oddly, I was just reading about onions and dogs a few minutes ago. According to most references I've found, a little onion regularly for a long time, or a lot all at once, can cause a form of anemia in which the red blood cells pop. Though I doubt we'll make sure we make non-onion forms of everything for her, I think we'll be more careful about picking it out of her food scraps, taking it off her burgers, etc.

(Does that sound like we spoil her?)