Holy Mackerel! Mindful Chickens 12/12/2020

Yamiche and Weijia licking out the mackerel bowl this morning.

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I said I would write “mindful things” we did this week. The agenda of “Mindful Chickens” is to spend less money plus be mindful of the environment and our other values at the same time. Sometimes, one of those purposes wins over the other, but we can think before we spend, right?

1. I cut my hair. This is not a particular skill of mine, but I can do it well enough to not look like the Pittsburgh Paint Dutch boy.

I didn’t always cut my own hair and Len’s hair - but in quarantine, it’s a solution that saves time, money, and drama. 

2. We mixed dried dill into a half block of cream cheese to make a better-than-average sandwich/cracker spread. A block of cream cheese equals half of a box of butter in case you want to do the math to see which one is cheaper. Mostly, it’s tasty.

3. Okay, this is my big kahuna.

I made cat food!

It had never occurred to me to do this before – and Yamiche and Weijia are our 14th and 15th cat! Long story short, the wet cat foods we prefer to buy are $4 - 6.40/pound which is definitely pricier than we pay for most of OUR meat.  Plus, there’s the relentlessness of it; two 5.5 oz cans of chicken per day is around $3.

For $1.79 to $4/pound we bought – mackerel, chicken breasts (a bag of frozen ones on sale), a pork tenderloin (we ate most of it first.)

In the spirit of “How hard can it be?” I looked online, watched a couple videos, and realized wet cat food is a concoction that is about 4/5’s meat and 1/5th boiled squash or sweet potato or carrots, with maybe parsley simmered in with the meat or veggies. Put the cooked meat and some boiled veggie in the Cuisinart or blender. Make sure to add enough water or broth so that the final product is the consistency of canned cat food.

The mackerel is already cooked and it’s so oily and smelly that it woke the cats from their naps to come into the kitchen to meow at me. That was cute. BOY do they love mackerel, which is the cheapest meat we bought.

I read that cats get most of their water from wet food. Even if they will drink from a water dish, chances are they aren’t drinking enough to stave off long term kidney damage. I don’t know where I read this, so ask your own vet.  Caught my attention though.

Weijia and Yamiche love their homemade food.  We put some is a plastic tub in the fridge and just dish it out when we feed them.  I also put some in tiny plastic containers in the freezer. 

This saves money plus a lot of single-use containers of cat food going into landfills. We will continue to buy bags of dry kibble for them as a side dose of vitamins.

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What hacks, strategies, and ideas do you do to save money and/or live more thoughtfully?