Dog Food

I've had some people ask about the food we feed our dogs, so I'll blog about how we do it :) For those of you who don't know, we do not feed our dogs "dog food". Instead, we cook for them. Yes, it's a labor of love. Yes, I wish sometimes I could just open a bag of food and pour it into a bowl instead of cooking. Yes, it does take more time, but I'm also convinced it adds years to their life. For example, my rottweiler Rita was 13 years old when she started slipping. We thought for sure she was going to die soon, but a twist of fate happened; Mandi decided she wasn't going to eat dog food anymore. Since she was pregnant, and I had wrestled with her before on the food issue (so it wasn't just morning sickness) I decided to take the plunge and make dog food. I had done tons of research on the topic before, so I knew what kinds of foods they needed in their diet, as well as the ones that should be avoided. As soon as we started to cook for them, a funny thing happened; Rita came right back around and was looking and acting better than she had in a long time. Unfortunately, dogs can't live forever and Rita passed away last month at the ripe old age of 14 and 2 months. I'm convinced if she had been on the homemade meals her whole life she probably would have lived longer, but that is something I will find out with my current four legged friends. Pictured below is a picture of our Rita taken a couple months before her passing:

Now on to how we make the food....We have Saladmaster cookware so it makes the process a little easier, but I'm sure it could be done in the oven or a crockpot too.

First we gather all the ingredients together and of course rinse them off:

Pictured below: Some of the ingredients for five meals (or 2 & 1/2 days) for 5 big dogs and 1 chihuahua :)

Typical ingredients include potatoes, sweet potatoes, cabbage (red & green), pears, apples, carrots, celery, cranberries, parsley, zucchuni, broccoli, chicken, sometimes Alaskan salmon or Alaskan Cod, eggs, egg shells, wheat germ, and goat's milk is added to cool it down once in the bowls. (Some ingredients change depending on what's in season. For example, in the fall we feed pumpkin, and right now we aren't feeding pears because they are too high)

Then we cut all the produce up on our Saladmaster Machine (this is the ultimate time saver! If we had to chop everything with a knife, we would have quite before we started!)

After everything is cut up, we bag it and put it in the fridge.

Then twice a day (breakfast and dinner), we dump the whole bag into our 7 quart saladmaster pot, add the eggs and meat (meat is cooked before hand and stored in tupperware), we turn the heat to medium (anything hotter would just cook all the good stuff out of the food), and when the pot starts clicking (something it does when internal temp reaches 187 degrees) we turn it down to low and let it cook until the eggs are done which is about 15-20min. Once cooked, we stir it up, dish it out, and add goat's milk and wheat germ to the food.

Seems complicated when you hear home cooked dog food, but it's really not :)

Pictured below is a diferent meal that we fed them for breakfast which included eggs, egg shells, chicken, rice, brussel sprouts, wheat germ, bananas, apples, and strawberries.