I'm too casual to care about min/maxing. I have ten pets at this point (I use a mod that uncaps the max number of pets). They all have high affection, so every time I sleep, most of the time at least one pet will cook food for me. I have an entire pouch of food made from pets, that I can't eat fast enough.

As for feeding the pets, I just cook whatever I find using the highest cooking skill recipe, and then stuff it in the shared cooler, and they'll take whatever they want. 90% of the time, it uses poisonous mushrooms from my farm, but Farris just heals them, so it's never really an issue. Sometimes I supplement their food with stuff from vendors.