I haven't had the nerve to get beef heart yet......ewwww.  I have bought chicken hearts & gizzards but I put them in boiling water.  However, might I add that the house does not smell any better than baking them or nuking them.  If anyone comes to visit, I have to tell them that I was just cooking for my dog because it smells gross in here.  I don't want them to think this is how the house usually smells.....tee hee.  Then I get my can of Oust & spray all around the house.  Hannah is in the kitchen with her tail going a mile a minute with her nose raised high in the air probably saying "oh wow, does this ever smell yummy".......yuk!

I have tried to puree them but they are pretty tough & my food processors don't like them very much & don't do a very good job.  So I take a sharp knife & cut them into small pieces & then add them to Hannah's meal.  She loves them.

I hard boil eggs for her & then I rinse the shells, dry them & take a mortar & pestle to them.  I have tried coffee grinder, food processor......you name it......nothing grinds them down like the m & p does.  I haven't tried the rolling pin though.

I have found sardines made in the USA but have to use Snows for clams because it's about all I can find.  Both the sardines & clams are a once-in-a-while addition to her meals.

OK, a bone question.  I know you're not supposed to feed whole cooked bones to dogs or cats because the cooking makes them brittle & dangerous.  But is it OK to cook bones, then grind them to put in food?  I suppose that's what bone meal is, bones ground up after cooking. 

While I was taking apart the latest cooked chicken carcass the other day, looking at all that bone I was going to waste, I thought, I could just dump all this & the bone into a grinder & probably make the perfect proportion of meat to bone food for my cats.  Then I could just add some veggies & replace their evening canned meal with that mix.  Maybe the chicken bones don't grind well?

Anitra Frazier in her book has this high calcium recipe where she makes chicken stock from whole chicken then shred the chicken... boils it again, then throws the chicken flesh away then continues on to boil the chicken bones and then crushes them. I think she throws away the pieces later after removinf much of the marrow.  I have to check on that.

Cooked bones are dangerous only if given in large peices precisely bease they can splinter and damage the tummy and intestines.    If you can grind the cooked chicken bones very fine, then it should be OK.  Dr. Pierson who feeds her cats raw food from Hare2day says that its OK to cook the ground-in-bone meat... she half-cooks the raw of one of her cats and says she's not worried about the bones in the ground meat becuase they are very finely ground.  She has a website - Dr. Lisa Pierson (sp?).  A quote from her:

"I do not worry about cooking the ground bones.  I grind them so fine that this is not even a remote concern for me."

see

http://www.catinfo.org/makingcatfood.htm#With_Bones....or_Without_Bones

Hope this helps your decision over what to do with those bones

Ok, you guys should be proud of me.  I actually bought chicken hearts and gizzards today.  And I did not retch once.

I found them in a package together at a small grocery near my home, where I don't go often.  They were even from antibiotic/additive free chickens!  Makes me wonder, based on their being packaged together, if this chicken processor (a big one) has caught on to the idea that people are using them to make pet food.  Seemed to be just about the right amounts in proportion to each other.

The livers are easy to find, so the above innards are (buried deeply) in my freezer until such time as I obtain the livers and make a batch.  I just did a turkey thigh batch yesterday, so we are good for this week.  I also baked a wild-caught 4oz salmon fillet and ground it up with half a jar of baby food carrots and a bit of eggshell powder.  I know that is not a complete food, so I added a little supplement:  A friend of mine who had tried home-cooking for her cats and was not successful gave me a bottle of a Wysong powder that she had bought--it's called Call of the Wild or something like that.  While I am not big on powders, I am considering trying this (since it was free) while I work to overcome my "innards aversion."  Do you think it is safe?  I stirred a little into the salmon mix and that actually got Cameo (the one who so far won't try home-cooked) to lick up a little of the salmon.

Yes - Wysong's Call of the Wild is designed to be added to an all-meat (chicken, turkey, beef, etc) meal.  Just follow directions by the look of it.  I've not used it myself, though.

Last night Cameo ate a whole serving of the home-cooked, supplemented salmon!  She would not eat it out of the dish, though--I had to hand-feed her.  But for a cat who will eat no wet food other than Tiki Cat tuna and an occasional single bite of Instinct rabbit or Azmira ocean fish,  this is great progress.  Now all 5 of mine will eat some home-cooked.  The baby food veggies seem to have been the secret.

I am going to try adding some salmon to the chicken or turkey to see if it will entice Cami.

Well, I found out this week that my cats are a lot like me:  They don't care much for "innards."  I finally got up the courage and made a batch of chicken according to a recipe from kaffe with thighs, livers, hearts, and gizzards.  I baked the "innards" in a covered dish, but had to shut myself into a room on a different floor of the house because I was gagging from the smell.

Darn, but those gizzards are hard things to cut up!

Except for Linley (who I think would try to eat a whole raw moose if I gave it to him), the cats were much less enthusiastic about this recipe than they are about the plain muscle meat of chicken or turkey, or the ones I added fish to.  I don't know if the "innards recipe" is going to get made again, considering the gross-out factor and the fact that they don't seem to like it much.  Maybe I'll just have to keep on adding the Wysong supplement to muscle meat.

Thanks for the suggestions, kaffe.  I'll see what I can do with sneaking in little bits of things.

My hold-out kitty Cameo BTW has decided she has a quota of home-cooked food: exactly two hand-fed little bites.  She comes around mewing (well, squeaking really, because many manx don't have very loud voices) when I am dishing up the meal for the others.  She wants two bites, will not accept more or less.  I did not know cats could count!  Then she flounces off and stares at the cupboard where I keep the kibble!