Homemade Dog Food

Our adopted dog came with no teeth, so she needs soft dog food. But we could not find a brand that agreed with her. Everything gave her diarrhea, so finally we took her to the vet to see what the problem was and discovered that she was allergic to chicken. Upon reading the labels of canned dog food, we found that EVERYTHING had chicken in it. So, the only thing to do was to make our own dog food for her. 

As it turns out, my recipe costs about a third of what the good canned dog food costs. I use 1/3 meat, 1/3 vegetables and fruit and 1/3 rice, barley, oatmeal or chopped up spaghetti. I try to make a large enough amount that it is good for 2 or 3 months worth of dog food, but if you don’t have room in your freezer, you could make smaller batches, or you can just cook all the meat up and then freeze it to add the other ingredients later.

I normally cook up beef and pork roasts together in my big roaster without any salt or other spices. I’m always on the lookout for good deal on the meat, and I’m happy if I can it for around $2 a pound. After the roasts are well cooked, let them cool and then slice up all the meat and chop it into very small pieces. 

When all the meat is all cut up finely, fill a large pot half full of the meat and then chop up fruit and vegetables very finely or grate them until you have filled the second half of the pot up with the raw vegetables. (If you have a food processor, you can do this part of the job much faster than me!) Then fill the pot up with water and bring it to a boil until the vegetables are soft.

After the vegetables are cooked, drain the water from the pot into another container and measure it.  If you use the water drained from cooking the vegetables and meat together to cook your rice in, you won’t lose any flavour or vitamins.  To cook rice, you will need twice the amount of liquid as rice, so if you are cooking 4 cups of raw rice, you will need 8 cups of liquid. You can always top up the liquid with water, if there is not enough juice. Cook the rice in a large pot by bringing the rice and water to a boil, then turn it down to simmer and cook with the lid on until the rice absorbs the liquid.

The final step is mixing the cooked rice, barley or oatmeal with the meat and vegetable mixture. Mix 2 cups of the drained meat and vegetables  with 1 cup of rice. If you prefer, you can cook up a big batch of spaghetti and after it cools, chop it up into small pieces to mix with the meat and vegetable mixture.