Batch Day Groove, Making Raw Work for You.
I'm not going to lie. At times I can be extremely anal about making my raw meals for Remy and Qaedo. I have spent hours even days creating menus making sure there was variety, proper proportions and making sure each had enough to eat. I even made extensive recipe cards, excel calculators and excel charts to achieve this goal. In all honesty it's fun and enjoyable for me.
When I first started raw feeding I had found a recipe and instructions on how to prepare it on catinfo.org written by veterinarian Lisa A. Pierson. It was a great place to start as everything was already there. I didn't have to figure anything out really. I just had to buy my ingredients and put it through the grinder, portion it into containers and I was done. Soon thought I wanted to start using whole food ingredients (versus the plethora of supplements in the recipe) which is when I found several Facebook groups for prey model raw which included muscle meat, organs and bones that were chunked versus ground.
One of these groups had a calculator. All you had to do was put in the meats, organs and bones you were using, plug in each of your pets' weights and it balanced the recipe for you and told you how much to feed each cat. To make things easy I just chunked everything and mixed it all together in one big bucket. Not too much thought had to be put into it. I however wanted more variety on a daily basis versus variety within one batch that was fed over a few months.
This is when I started making menus and planning each day's individual meals over a weeks timespan. Each day was different than the previous day but was balanced over a weeks period. It seemed the cats liked the variety better. As mentioned above I would sit in front of calculators and excel sheets planning out these menus and creating recipe cards to post on the fridge, complete with a color coding system.
During my last batch about 1.5 weeks ago I realized, I could make this even easier on myself. All I needed to do was figure out how much meat, organ and bone I needed, divide that among the ingredients I wanted to use and roughly divide that into my containers for the week. I didn't have to go crazy with weighing out each and every daily meal or scrutinize over what they are getting everyday, I could visually see it.
These calculators, menus and organizational skills definitely came in handy when I first started out and I appreciate the ease, but I finally have streamlined my own process and figured out what works best for me! I am super excited. I will continue to create resources and tools for others just getting started on raw feeding but after making a few batches others too can find their Batch Day Groove.