Yea, meal preparation is often kind of a fiasco for me and my cats. At breakfast (and making my "brown bag" lunch), Gaga usually comes running up and demands "her cut", which usually consists of some deli turkey. She'll scream at me like she's dying of hunger, and then Serafina will hear all the ruckus and come running too, not wanting to miss out.
At lunch and dinner, it's just a matter of what is for dinner or lunch. For most meals, they watch what I'm doing curiously, but patiently, knowing that they will get some good stuff in their dish when I'm done. Really no drama there. But if I'm cooking some sort of meat dish, either inside on the stove/oven, or outside on the BBQ, then they'll get real worked up and start pacing back and forth in the kitchen, looking for opportunities to snatch unguarded meat. If I leave meat on a plate on a counter, even for a moment... it'll be gone. Snatched, grabbed, dragged off. That has happened many times
Otherwise if I am careful (which I try to be), they'll simply get all worked up and demanding when the meat comes in, and they get "their cut" when I'm dishing out the finished meal.