22 May 2011
bread and future plans
So that sourdough loaf I made the other night?
Looks beautiful on the outside... but is extremely dense on the inside. I followed the recipe in the book as closely as possible, so I don't think I over-kneaded it. Eh - it's still pretty yummy, just not sandwich material. More like slather-with-peanut-butter-or-eat-with-a-hunk-of-cheese-on-a-picnic material. I have the starter living contentedly in my fridge, and plan to try the bread again and the sourdough pancake recipe sometime this summer.
I had a very quiet weekend now that Kevin is back home for three weeks. My highlight was spring cleaning my two closets in preparation for his move-in for two months. The man needs a closet. So I took everything out of the closets, bagged some clothes for Goodwill, consolidated items into boxes and labeled them so in six months I know where to find my hiking boots, and left his closet with only one shelf occupied (with linens, hand towels and kitchen rags). I was quite proud of the endeavor. I love cleaning and consolidating (when it's for fun!), regardless of the time of year.
I fly to New York on Friday, to spend a weekend with my family in Ithaca at my brother's college graduation, and then five days in New York City spending time with both friends and my parents. The trip shall be exciting - I haven't been to the East Coast in five years. And this year, I get to go twice!
13 May 2011
wild bubbly yeasts
Isn't that awesome?!?!
It's my first-ever sourdough starter. I thought I had to buy one online or in a natural foods store... it turns out, thanks to the ever-helpful book The Urban Homestead (written by Echo Park locals), that you don't need to spend any money. (I clearly don't know much about sourdough.) Just mix a half-cup of white flour and a half-cup of lukewarm water in a large wide-mouthed jar, put it somewhere warm (I'm keeping it on top of my vintage gas stove, which is always warm to the touch) and give it some TLC every day for a while. Like its a pet.
Meaning, pour out half a cup of the liquid and then add to it a fresh half-cup of water and half-cup of flour. Miss one day of this while it's still developing, and you kill the starter (yikes!). Yesterday was the first day it started smelling truly sourdoughy (which was Day 4). Somewhere between four and ten days, it's ready, and you can keep it in the fridge indefinitely. To "wake it up: when you're ready to bake, you do the above for a little bit, and then it's ready to go.
I absolutely adore bread (who doesn't?), but I haven't baked, let alone regularly eaten it, in a long time - my relationship with bread is complicated, you could say. But I've been reading a lot about fermentation and raw foods recently, and I fail to find anything unnatural about baking and eating bread made with a starter you made and grew yourself in your kitchen with love and patience. So, my foray back into homemade bread begins now.
The starter should be ready sometime soon. So, check back for bread results sometime soon!
08 May 2011
on kittens, cats, and optimum nutrition
So what's been going on?
I am transitioning the kittens cats to a raw food diet. This isn't as radical as it sounds - unlike humans, cats are biologically designed to eat raw food. They are obligate carnivores. In the wild, what does Felinae eat? Prey they catch and kill. Muscle tissue, organs, blood, and bones. In the wild, cats don't eat vegetables or plant matter. The only vegetables they would consume would be the partially digested last meal of their prey, still in the stomach. Cats are physiologically built to stalk, pounce upon, and tear up small warm-blooded animals. They rarely drink water; when eating appropriate raw food they derive most moisture from the meat itself.
Contrast their biological needs with what most domesticated cats are fed.
Commercial dry pet food - "kibble" - and most canned food is made from "the leftover waste materials from the production of human food". Most of this stuff comes from "rendering plants" that process waste products not usable for any other purpose into boiled, pressurized, pulverized grit that is mixed with grain product, formed into pebble shapes and sold as dry food. This is what most commercial pet food is: it reads as "meal" on the package (bone meal, meat meal - slightly less sketchy is chicken meal, but its still chicken waste products, not actual chicken). Other things put into commercial pet food are corn and soy, as the United States has a glut of both products thanks to subsidization, and they are extremely abundant and thus cheap. These are almost always the first ingredient (and thus the largest percentage) listed in dry food. The ingredients of Friskies Indoor Delights Dry Cat Food:
Ground yellow corn, corn gluten meal, chicken by-product meal, meat and bone meal, soybean meal, beef tallow preserved with mixed-tocopherols (form of Vitamin E), turkey by-product meal, powdered cellulose, animal liver flavor, soybean hulls, malt extract, phosphoric acid, calcium carbonate, potassium chloride, salt, choline chloride, dried cheese powder, added color (Yellow 6, Yellow 5, Red 40, Blue 2 and other color), parsley flakes, taurine, calcium phosphate, Vitamin E supplement, zinc sulfate, ferrous sulfate, niacin, manganese sulfate, Vitamin A supplement, calcium pantothenate, thiamine mononitrate, copper sulfate, riboflavin supplement, Vitamin B-12 supplement, pyridoxine hydrochloride, folic acid, Vitamin D-3 supplement, calcium iodate, biotin, menadione sodium bisulfite complex (source of Vitamin K activity), sodium selenite.
It makes me sad to think that most cats in this country are fed crap like this. It's the equivalent of junk food for people: highly processed corn, soy and meat products, i.e. McDonalds every day. Not enough to make them overweight (although a lot of cats are overweight) but enough to slowly destroy them internally - as happens to humans. (Or not so slowly: remember the massive pet food recall of 2007?) I firmly believe that all diseases and maladies are a result of inadequate nutrition (as well as environmental factors, to a small extent). I've been doing research and reading lots of books and articles about this, and the more I learn, the more I am blown away by the absolute disconnect in the Western world between people and their food. But that is another blog post.
You can find excellent websites about cats and raw food that explain this better than I am doing (see below for links). Suffice to say, dry food is terrible for cats - not only is it highly processed under extreme heat with subpar ingredients, but it lacks any moisture. It also does not clean teeth, as most people believe. (Do crackers clean our teeth?) Canned food is the better of the two because the first ingredient is usually some kind of meat product or byproduct, and it is wet, but it usually includes a grain (often wheat, rice or oats) or even worse, dairy products, and is cooked. Essentially, humans buy food that sounds good to them - and feed it to their pets. Beef with gravy, grilled chicken and cheddar cheese, lamb and rice, ocean fish in cream sauce.
How unbelievably inappropriate. We humans are uncomfortable with the following: organ meat, blood, bones, uncooked animal products, a diet devoid of grains, dairy, vegetables and fruits, and leaving raw meat at room temperature (some of these are with good reason, considering our physiology and biology) - we can't imagine that any of this is good for cats. Yet that is their most appropriate diet. There is no such thing as "kitten food" in the wild, either. (On that note, humans would do well to re-consider the idea of "kid's food" in our world.) From an economic standpoint, I believe that in feeding animals a diet as close to what is biologically appropriate for them as possible, the chances are significantly decreased that your pet will develop in old age medical complications that incur expensive vet bills. But I also believe in the principle of honoring nature. If I grow organic vegetables in containers on my patio, why do I not learn and provide what is best for my warm blooded companion animals?
For the first year of my cats' lives, I fed them premium commercial grain-free food - Nature's Variety, Before Grain, and Wellness - and stuck to relatively small animals - chicken, turkey, duck, and rabbit - no cows or deer or lamb, as they aren't the prey of small felines. This food is far more nutritious than the typical cat food sold in supermarkets, and my cats seem to be very healthy (for now - they are only a year old), but that food is not what they are designed to eating. They ate 60/40 wet to dry... and clearly preferred wet. They only resorted to dry food when they were still hungry and had no other choice. I first learned about raw food a year ago when I adopted the kittens and was obsessively reading about raising healthy cats. I even bought a bag of Nature's Variety Instinct raw chicken... but gave up after a tepid response from Klaus and Bella. I'm pretty sure I just put down a piece for dinner and hoped they would wolf it down. Little did I know then that cats are cautious eaters and rarely dive into anything unknown until they know its not going to kill them.
This time around, I'm taking the transition slowly. I ditched the dry food immediately, and started out 20% raw, 80% canned. Over the week, I increased the raw and decreased the canned, and both cats have been eating the raw. Klaus still prefers canned and eats the entire canned portion and nibbles at the raw because he's still hungry, but doesn't finish it. Bella is completely converted to raw. This morning, I opened the fridge to discover I had forgotten to thaw any raw overnight, thanks to complete exhaustion due to working a two-day conference Friday and Saturday. All I had up ready to serve was canned, so that's what the cats got. Klaus the machine immediately chowed down, but Bella - who I knew was hungry - looked, sniffed, sniffed some more, turned around and walked away. Repeated offerings over the next hour did nothing to get her to eat. She won't starve, so I waited until noon when a raw medallion had thawed out, and she devoured it, along with three more for dinner. Half a mission accomplished. Now onto the Klausmeister.
My plan, once I have both cats eating 100% raw, is to keep them on a commercial raw food such as the one they are on now - Nature's Variety, which is made in Nebraska and shipped frozen to my local pet store - until I feel comfortable with the logistics of raw, Then I want to experiment with making homemade raw food. It's not as simple as plopping a raw chicken thigh in a dish - there are some vital mineral and vitamin requirements for cats - but it doesn't seem to be that hard, either. There is plenty of advice and instructions available, and you can make a large batch that will last a month in the freezer. It's also proven to be cheaper than buying food. As with making anything from scratch that is easily purchased in a store, the time and energy involved is only an inconvenience if you don't derive pleasure from the act itself. I make yogurt from whole milk using a soup pot, which takes 90 minutes plus twelve hours incubation time, but I enjoy the act of making it so much that the time and energy expenditure are worth all the pleasure I derive. I doubt making my cats healthy food at home will be any different.
Raw food for cats: resources
Common sense. Healthy cats. The bible on the Internet. Written by a veterinarian.
Includes recipes for homemade.
Cat Nutrition. Informative, well written, and with a sense of humor.
Feline Nutrition Education Society. Lots of articles, updated frequently.
Raw Fed Cats. Easy to read. The e-book you must purchase (I haven't) but the links on the left are free.