I have to tell you, my house smells pretty good right now. And I'm not even cooking anything that I'm going to consume - this is the dogs' dinner, actually dinner and breakfast for the next couple of days.
What's in it? This time I put in ground turkey, brown rice, oatmeal, beef broth, sweet potato, carrots, peas, eggs (plus shells), some wheat germ and some nutritional yeast. It's kind of like making turkey meatloaf.
Here are a couple of things I have learned so far:
- You can buy brown rice and cook it in the rice cooker, and add it to the cooked ground meat later. OR you can cheat and buy Trader Joe's cooked brown rice (in the rice aisle in these neat little packets) and just add it to the cooked meat and let them simmer together. A bit more expensive but saves a lot of time.
- Ground turkey is definitely preferable to ground beef. Ground beef is SO fatty that you have to drain it after cooking, and even then there is this gross fat film over everything. Ground turkey cooks up great and never needs draining, and it costs about the same as ground beef.
- Cook in broth. Doesn't really matter what kind, beef or chicken. It adds moisture so that when it's refrigerated and then microwaved at a later date, it isn't all dry and crumbly.
- Microwave for 30 seconds after it's been refrigerated. The dogs respond to a warm meal far more than to a cold one. If you microwave for too long, the food will be too hot, and there is nothing worse than the dogs knowing that there is food in their bowls but that you are not letting them eat it. They don't get "cooling down".
- Put 1 (or 2) servings in plastic containers, like fast food containers, that can be microwaved. That way, it's as easy as opening up a can of dog food at feeding time.
- You can eat what they eat! But add the "human" ingredients later, after they are fed, such as garlic and onions, spices, sugar, etc. Those things are not good for dogs, and will cause digestive problems. Plain, all-natural food with the basic food groups covered: meat, vegetable fiber, and whole grain starches tastes great to them, they don't need additional flavor enhancers.
