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How to Make Dog Food

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In the past, I’ve written about cooking up real food in the kitchen for Cassie the Corgi. Making your own dog food is really very easy, especially for a small dog, and there’s no question in my mind that it’s better for the dog than kibble, which is made from some very suspect products.

The idea of making dog food came to my house during the late, great melamine scare, when unknown numbers of American dogs (possibly thousands) were poisoned by tainted ingredients from China used by almost every major American pet food manufacturer. At the time I had an aged German shepherd and a greyhound. With almost every brand tainted or suspect, about the only thing I could see to do was research what dogs need to sustain them and fix my pets’ food myself.

Well, the Ger-shep was very decrepit, indeed, by this time in her life. She could barely haul herself to her feet and hobble around the house; I didn’t think she had many more months left in her.

To my amazement, shortly after I started feeding her a mix of real food—meat, veggies, and starch—she began to pep up. After a couple of weeks on this regimen, one day she was able to chase her neglected ball around the back yard. It was as though she had bought back two or three years of doggy  life.

Well, cooking dog food for a big animal, let alone for two of them, isn’t very practical. However, for a smaller one, it’s very easy and doesn’t cost any more than premium commercial food.

Dogs, having evolved with humans for the past 16,000 years, thrive on approximately the same foods that we thrive on, with a few exceptions.

• They need a slightly higher proportion of meat to vegetables and grains: about 1/2 meat, 1/4 vegetables, and 1/4 starch
• They can profit from cruciform veggies such as broccoli and cauliflower
• Other root vegetables are good for them
• Dogs are not nuts about leafy vegetables, although a little spinach now and then is OK
• Some berries such as blueberries are well tolerated
• Whole grains like oatmeal are healthy and provide roughage
• Brown or converted rice is pretty good for them; potato is also good
• Most dogs love sweet potatoes (yams)
• This stuff should be cooked, not fed raw. It is not true that dogs are magically immune to pathogens such as salmonella and E. coli that live in raw meats.

Certain foods must be avoided, because they’re toxic to dogs. These include

→ Onions: DO NOT FEED!
→ Garlic: DO NOT FEED!
→ Chocolate: POISONOUS TO DOGS; DO NOT FEED!
→ Grapes and raisins: DO NOT FEED!
→ Bones, raw or cooked: DO NOT FEED!
→ Corn: Indigestible and allergenic: AVOID!
→ Fish: One of the most common allergens for dogs: USE SPARINGLY OR AVOID

With those facts in mind, just about anything else goes.

I usually look for the most inexpensive meat available—right now, chicken thighs are cheap, and it’s easy to remove the bones from thighs. Pork also often comes on sale. If beef prices ever come down (right now beef is too high even for me to eat, much less to feed to the dog!), some stores put certain roasts on sale, and you can have the butcher grind the meat into hamburger. This, BTW, is much tastier than the pricier burger that comes preground in packages. Ethnic markets are good places to seek out low-price but wholesome meats suitable for your dog.

Oatmeal, converted rice, and brown rice can be had very cheaply in bulk. Look in markets like Sprouts or ethnic stores that sell bulk products.

A mix of frozen veggies that contains no corn or onion is perfect for dogs. Costco markets such a blend in large bags as “Normandy Style” vegetables. In the wild, a dog would get vegetable matter from the gut of its prey, partially digested. Thus cooking vegetables lightly and then chopping them fine approximates the form in which this food should be most digestible for a predator that is not an obligatory carnivore (as is the case with dogs). Microwave the frozen veggies until they’re just barely cooked through—they should not be soggy. Then run them through a blender or food processor to chop finely.

Sometimes I combine these ingredients as we go, creating a fresh meal for Cassie each time she eats. However, the other day I decided to fix an entire pot  of ready-made dog food, containing all the ingredients in one product. It turned out surprisingly well—tastes like thick chicken stew and contains everything the dog needs.

Here’s how it went together:

1 large package of chicken thighs, preferably boned (about 5 pounds)
1 yam, cut in chunks
1 cup converted rice
2 or 3 cups mixed frozen vegetables: broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots

Place the chicken in a large pot. Add the yam and rice. Cover with water, bring to a boil, and then immediately turn the heat down to a slow simmer. Cook until the yam is soft and the chicken is cooked through. Remove and discard bones.

Meanwhile, microwave the veggies until just slightly cooked and then chop them finely in a food processor or blender.

When the chicken, yam, and rice mixture is cooked (the rice will swell up and absorb most of the water), turn off the heat and mix in the chopped vegetables. If you used bone-in chicken thighs, remove and discard the cooked bones. Allow to cool before feeding to the dog, obviously.

The finished product

Batches of home-made dog food can be stored in plastic containers or baggies and kept in the freezer for future use. The potful shown above will feed my 25-pound pooch for at least a couple of weeks, and probably more like three weeks.

The amount to feed depends on your dog, its age, its size, and its level of activity. Some sources advise feeding about 2.5% to 3% of the desired body weight. Determine what a normal weight for your dog should be (ask your vet). Then weigh the animal regularly to be sure it stays on that target. I feed the corgi about 6 ounces twice a day (morning and evening), or a little less than a pound a day. She’s neither sedentary nor overly active; her weight stays stable at 25 pounds.

The beauty of cooking your own dog food is that you know what’s in it and you know how it was prepared. If you feel any concern that your concoction may not supply all the animal’s needs, simply drop a dog vitamin pill in a bowl of food each day. Use veterinary vitamins, which are better proportioned for a dog’s needs than supplements made for humans. I rarely add them and have found the dogs thrive on real food with no added, expensive vitamins.

Cassie the Corgi
The Queen of the Galaxy

w00t! MacJoy!

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Just got back from the Mac store, where The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc., purchased a fine new capital  expenditure: a brand-new 27-inch 2.7 GH quad-core fancy new iMac! With extra memory thingies added! And a magic trackpad thingie!

Is it or is it not the MOST gorgeous thing?

Ohhh my little business has been needing a new computer for soooo long. I just hate updating hardware and software: if it ain’t busted, why do I have to waste my time fixing it and then learning how the fix works? So I’ve put it off and put it off.

But I’ve delayed as long as I can delay. The decrepit old iMac runs with the speed of a stampeding snail. Worse  yet, it’s so superannuated its operating system can not be updated to the latest large cat Apple is selling. And that means it can’t access iCloud and it can’t do a whole lot of things it needs to be doing in the changing techno-environment.

The S-corporation has actually earned enough, thanks to some improvements in FaM’s ad sales, to afford this gadget. And I think, what with the need for Cloud apps, improved memory and speed, and increasing editorial business, we can justify it comfortably.

Left the little MacBook, which I’ve been using as the business’s main computer for the past several months as the ancient iMac has succumbed to entropy, down at the Apple store to be Lionized and then to be cloned over onto the new machine. Friday I have to spend an hour with Apple’s coaches learning how to use the new software (and you can bet it will take weeks or months to figure it all out). And then it comes home!

Next: a new printer/scanner. Maybe a laser printer, hm?

🙂

 

Market on the Move: Ultrafrugal produce

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Saturday morning La Maya and I set out at dawn for a new-to-us produce market, a moveable feast hosted by a nonprofit group called the 3000 Club. What these people do is “rescue” produce that grocers and distributors would toss out because it’s not the perfect size or shape to sell instantly or because it hasn’t moved off grocery shelves in a day or two. Each year, millions of pounds of veggies and fruits are thrown in the landfill. The 3000 club acquires this otherwise doomed food. The produce is donated and sold through the group’s Market on the Move, where $10 will buy you up to 60 pounds (!) of produce.

Proceeds go to support food banks and other worthy causes.

So it was off to the nearest market. Semi trucks haul loads of produce to a number of churches and community centers around the Valley each weekend. We chose to visit one in a small food desert on the north end of the conduit of blight that is 19th Avenue, putting us down on the backside of Moon Valley in an area where the only supermarket, a decrepit Safeway, closed years ago.

The produce was incredible! Though selection was limited, it was huge. We found spectacular heirloom tomatoes, peppers, gorgeous eggplants, zucchini, crookneck squash, organic sweet grape tomatoes, piles of sweet corn. For ten bucks, I got as much food as I could carry (which was far from 60 pounds!). And this weekend I set out to roast it all.

Check out the bounty:

And take a look at these amazing heirloom tomatoes:

I couldn’t have bought those alone (or the three boxes of fancy organic “grape” tomatoes, either) for ten bucks. Amazing, huh?

They were on the high side of ripe and needed to be consumed or prepared right away, more about which later. Meanwhile, I needed some onions and carrots, which the Market on the Move didn’t offer. Six dollars later I returned from the corner ethnic market with more loot:

Mwa ha ha! All I needed to turn the MoM loot into gold, and then some. Plus a can of sardines in tomato sauce. w00t!

I kept half of one of those purple tomatoes and a large, firm red one for Saturday’s dinner, which was mozzarella slices sandwiched between juicy, sweet/tangy tomato slices drenched in a vinaigrette made of Meyer lemon juice (from the backyard tree), garlic, and olive oil, accompanied by some roasted asparagus and lettuce from the back yard.

Then I minced a half-dozen cloves of garlic and about a half-cup of back-yard parsley, which I stirred into about 3/4 cup of olive oil. Cut the remaining tomatoes in half, arrayed them in baking pans, and packed them with the garlic, parsley, and olive oil mix.

Set these in a preheated 400-degree oven and let them roast for about an hour.

When you do this, tomatoes melt down into an incredible sauce. All that remained to do was to lift them out of the pan into a bowl and whack them into a sauce with a fork. The result is staggeringly delicious. Perfect for pasta or for some of that eggplant that came from the MoM.

Then I roasted all the corn on the cob, as well as a bunch of asparagus I’d picked up at a Safeway. Tossed both in olive oil; flavored the asparagus with a little tarragon and the corn with some fines herbes.

Today I’m still cooking. I’ll convert the squash, onion, and eggplant into ratatouille, some of which I may flavor with a bit of that cilantro from the Mexican market. What’s left, I intend to use in a “vegetable stew” from the Provençal cookbook I picked up at an estate sale—it looks fresher and brighter than traditional ratatouille. The carrots will be roasted with sweet herbs, and the cabbage with onions, garlic, apple, and white wine.

By golly, there’s enough veggies there to last me for a month! 🙂 What doesn’t get eaten quickly will go into the freezer, ready to spring into action when needed.

Watch for organizations like this in your town. It’s an improvement over a CSA because you get to select what you want, rather than having to take what someone else puts in a food basket for you. And you don’t have to drive so far to find a Market on the Move venue. On the other hand, later in the day La Maya made a run on one at another site and found the choices and quality disappointing—apparently the quality of the market depends on the quality of the volunteers who are working it and the luck of the draw.

Jury Duty Postponed…

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…to a manageable date. The jury summons the Superior Court sent the other day gives one a chance to plead extreme financial hardship (we’re told this stratagem almost never works) or to ask for a postponement of jury duty. If you go online or telephone the talking robot, your choices are to postpone 60 days or 90 days.

Well, a 60-day postponement would land me smack in the middle of finals week. Ninety days would land me at the courthouse midway through my summer class.

However, if you call the talking robot and hit 0000, it will shunt you over to a human being.

This person kindly reset the appearance date to May 14, the Monday after spring semester grades are due.

Since I’ve never actually been empaneled on a jury (too nerdly, I guess), it’s unlikely they’ll take me this time. So with any luck all that will happen is eight hours of my time will be wasted cooling my heels in the jury-duty waiting room. Even if they do select me, the May 14 date provides two weeks and a day before class begins.

My summer course is a night class, Tuesdays and Thursdays. If I’m unfortunate enough to get stuck on a jury for a long-running trial (one colleague was tied up for over four weeks, after the judge had estimated the trial would take three or four days!), I’ll be looking at two Days from Hell a week, but at least I won’t lose pay.

Jeez. I have gotta get myself a real job. That, or get the editorial business to crank a steady flow of decently paying work, all the time.

Doctored and Drugged and Summoned

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So it was off to a specialist this morning, a pulmonologist recommended by a friend on the choir, who herself is an RN. He, I discovered when I got there, managed to get himself on Phoenix Magazine’s “Top Docs” list in 2011, for whatever that’s worth.

At any rate, his office proved to be very professional and efficient. They got me in to see him today when I called yesterday morning, which has to be some sort of all-time speed record for an American doctor’s office. At the Mayo, I couldn’t even get past the gate-keepers the last time I called–their phone answering lady just left me hanging, to suffer over the weekend and beyond.

He did some breathing tests and asked a wide variety of questions. Tentatively his theory is that it’s either a chronic bronchitis that began with a viral infection six weeks ago or is Valley fever. He’s redoing the Valley fever test, on the theory that antibodies often don’t show up until a month or more after the infection; however, when I said I’d tested positive in my 20s, he remarked that probably, then, this is not Valley fever. That notwithstanding, as long as he’s bleeding me anyway, he ordered the test.

He also is testing for a variety of other ailments and signs of asthma and allergies; next week he wants to do allergy tests.

Let’s hope he doesn’t decide I’m allergic to Cassie!

Never have had a problem with dogs before, though long-term exposure to cats gives me a chronic stuffy head. I had no idea it wasn’t normal for one’s nose to be plugged up until I left my husband and his houseful of cats. After I’d been away for a while, one day it dawned on me…hey! my head isn’t stuffy all the time. Since then I’ve avoided puddy tats.

At any rate, the new doc came forth with a packet of Prednisone pills considerably less powerful than the ones the Mayo’s ER doc gave me, and he said that yes, they would disarm my immune system, but not enough to cause a clinical immunocompromise. He felt that no matter what I might be infected with, the stuff would be safe to take in the short term.

He also thought I should start the antibiotic she gave me, but was puzzled when I told him she said I should do the Prednisone first and then if that didn’t work I should take the antibiotic. He said for acute bronchitis you’re supposed to take them together. And also swallow some Prilosec to try to control the bellyache these drugs will cause.

So in the course of two hours, I’ve gone from no drugs to three drugs a day

He said that even though the antibiotic is in the same family with erythromycin, which has caused some untoward effects in my body, 80 percent of people who have a bad reaction to erythromycin can tolerate this stuff. I pointed out that if a drug has a weird side effect, any weird side effect, I inevitably am gonna get it. He said if anything uncomfortable arises, just quit taking the stuff.

Meanwhile last night when I dragged out to the mailbox, what should I find but a jury summons.

Damn.

Actually, I don’t mind serving on a jury—or wouldn’t, if I ever got past the stage of wasting eight hours in the court’s waiting room. But the problem right now is that if I miss a day of class, my pay is docked, no ifs ands or buts. I’m trying to get the District to come forth with a written statement of that policy, but the woman in the District office the college told me to call can’t be bothered to return my call.

Ideally, I would like to get myself excused from this recurring hassle. But if I can’t get her off the dime, it is at least possible to ask for a postponement, and apparently you can even go online and ask for a specific date. So if I can, I’ll just push it forward to this summer, which at least would give a week or two on which to serve, in the unlikely event that I’m called.

People with PhD’s by and large are not regarded by lawyers as any client’s “peers,” so in all these years I’ve never made it on to a jury.

A friend of mine did, though. The judge told the jury to expect the trial to last a couple of days. Two weeks later it was still dragging on!

She was teaching, too, but at GDU no one pays much attention to whether you’re there or not, and so she at least didn’t get the financial shaft. And she taught poli sci, not writing courses, making it possible for her to send her friends to the classroom bearing videos to keep the kiddies busy.

I, on the other hand, will simply lose my paycheck if I’m forced to serve on a jury.

The other concern is that experience shows the various courts are using the same rotating call-up list. You get called for Superior Court, then City Court, then Federal Court, then the Grand Jury. A summons to the Grand Jury is really bad news, because you’re shanghaied not for a week or two but for many, many  months, during which you’re on call and have to show up at the drop of a proverbial hat to proceedings that can last for lengthy periods. So I can expect at least two and possibly three more of these little headaches to show up in the mail within the next few weeks. Goodie!

Well, a ton of copy awaits. And so, to work…

 

Decluttering: Books

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Here’s today’s $64 question: ?

The academic’s standard gigantic home library (usually spilling over into the office, too) could, we must admit, be regarded as just another manifestation of hoarding. Wouldn’t a Kindle or an iPad be better be better than shelf on shelf of dust-catchers?

There are some reasons to think not. Visit Adjunctorium for that line of thought. Meanwhile, I’ve got to go winnow out those bookshelves. First, though, I need to shovel out two closets, a couple of file drawers, and a set of storage shelves.

Later!