A Truly Happy Meal
Jim and I were recently taking about things we loved eating when we were kids (we both grew up omni). We both loved the chicken nuggets from a certain unnameable place because they were batter-dipped, rather than breaded. Well, inspiration struck recently at Food Fight when I found veggie nuggets that weren't breaded and a packet of accidentally vegan McCormicks Batter Dip Mix. I tried to find a website for the nuggets we used, the brand in Li Ta and they are from Canada, but I couldn't find anything on them. You could easily use tempeh or even the Morningstar strips. 
And so we had our adult version of a Happy Meal, but this one is truly happy. I baked a bag of Alexia rosemary and olive oil fries to accompany our nuggets and poured some sides of barbeque sauce and dijon mustard for dipping. We shared a Blue Sky rootbeer to top off what was also a truly unhealthy meal. To make up for it we went bike riding after it all settled!
I was really happy with how the nuggets turned out. Because I didn't have to cook them as long as meat (since I didn't have to finish off killing them so they wouldn't kill us) the outside got crispy fast and I was able to pull them out before any oil was able to settle in them. I used canola oil, with it being what I had laying around. I would maybe try grapeseed next time, to see how that works.
I'll leave you all with a video of Moussa playing in the (dry) bathtub. We put down newspaper as a buffer because the tub was a bit cold. Not terribly eventful, but cute nonetheless.
9 comments:
Cute Moussa. What's in that dish? It looks like...worms...
In the dish in the bathtub, I mean.
Thanks so much for showing that cuteness of a video. Moussa is so adorable. The video could have been 5 minutes long and I would have watched him run around the whole time... Thanks!
The dish has, um, I forget exactly what is was now, but some kind of grass and dried papaya and mango chunks. It was a treat my sister-in-law bought for Moussa before we moved and I threw out the packaging. When she has treats like that we tend to give them to her sparingly. She needs to watch her figure! Actually, I'm rather anal about what she gets to eat because they put junk in most rodent food, sugar and crap like that. She typically eats fresh carrot, apple or pear everyother day and a mixture of seeds, nuts and dried corn and some little hard cereal bits (those things that look like pellets), but she doesn't really care for the cereal. Because hamsters, like other rodents, have teeth that continue to grow, we give her wood chunks and mini corn cobs to chew on to help keep her teeth down. I should get some video of her chewing on her mini corn cobs, it's so cute! We fortify her water with a little extra liquid hamster vitamin so we know that she is getting everything she needs.
Do you have any vitamins for your kitties? Or did you when you lived in AZ when the water is crap? Killian got a UTI (really bad) a few years ago and is now on prescription C/D formula for crystals in his urine and he drinks the bottled water we get from Water n Ice and I am concerned that he should get more minerals, but not so many like the tap water. I also want to keep his levels down so he isn't sick again. Do you have any recommendations?
And please do show Moussa eating corn!
The 'happy meal' looks great! My boyfriend adores those faux nuggets, there was a sad, sad period where Food Fight was out for a couple months, thankfully I haven't run into that in a while. They're not my thing, but I don't mind buying them in the least.
Leslie, the crystals in their urine seems sadly common with male cats and I've been keeping an eye out with our boys. We don't currently give them any vitamins. They eat Wysong food (which you'd have to mail order) which is all human grade (yes, my cats are not vegan. I hope this doesn't ruffle too many feathers, but that's not something I really care to discuss on a light-hearted, food-centered blog) and they use filtered water. I don't really know much about kitty vitamins, but I guess I'll have to learn more as they get older. Right now they're all fairly young and in good health (knock on wood) so I don't have much advice for you, except I think they have vitamins on the Wysong website and they are a great cat food company so I'd trust theirs, personally.
Oh, Jess, my hubby is hooked on the nuggets too. We'd gotten really good about not eating too much faux meat, but now it looks like we're bake to it again. They are pretty tasty, though, and if it might inspire Jim to cook, hallelujah.
We frequently batter-fry tofu, but I've never had batter-fried nuggets (I dont' think I even every had batter-fried nuggets as a kid...) We'll have to try that next time we bring out the fryer!
My vet warned me that crystals in the urine can be a sign of diabetes (we had a similar problem with our cat).
The video is super-cute!! :)
It's hard, if not impossible, to have even vegetarian cats, let alone vegan, as their bodies don't synthesize nutrients they need from just veggies. On vegetarian diets they can wind up blind, with heart failure, etc. I feel badly for the animals that are part of my cat's food, but its a rock and a hard place.
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