Cooking for pets: Share your treat recipes
By Gina Spadafori
March 2, 2008
Bernie mentioned that his wife makes salmon treats for Scout (share the recipe!) Dorene added recipes for liver brownies and liver pudding.
That got me to thinking we needed a pet treat recipe thread. So if you got ‘em, share ‘em.
Now, I have never baked treats for any pet. But that’s really no surprise since only recently have I started cooking for me. Yes, it’s true: The majority of meals in my single adult life have been of the frozen/nuke it variety, the cereal-and-milk variety, or (most often, most recent) the Whole Foods to-go variety.
But since late last year, I’ve also been trying to have a “Year of Living Greenly,” about which which I blog (albeit not as reliably as I do about pets) over here. (Yikes! I gotta blog before I get fired!) One of the things I’ve tried to do, with a fair measure of success, is eat at home, meals made from local and organic ingredients. (Local is green because it takes less fuel to transport it; organic is green because it’s less polluting and because manufactured fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides are fossil-fuel based.)
Most of the stuff I’ve been making is of the stew/soup/crockpot variety. And it’s not bad! I’ve even learned to do something with a parsnip. (It’s great in chicken soup.)
Unintended but extremely welcome consequences of making meals at home: 1) I’ve lost 20 pounds in three months (actually picture of me, above … not!); 2) my blood pressure, once a little high, is spot-on normal now (hmmm, lotta salt in that to-go stuff, ya think?); and 3) I’ve saved a ton of money. And that’s even still buying ingredients at Whole Foods a/k/a Whole Paycheck (I admit it: I love that store), although those purchases will diminish once the organic farmers markets get rolling, the local urban farm produce co-op gets the goods growing and my own garden gets in. (Not to mention my pets chickens start laying … once I get them and once they grow up. Pet Connection BFF Dr. Patty Khuly has me totally beat in the urban livestock pets category: She has goats! I’m checking the zoning now for my county now … )
So … why not make some treats for the animals? I mean, really, now that I know where the controls for the oven are!
Got recipe? Share ‘em. If you’ve got Web sites with pet-treat recipes you like, share them, too.
Elsewhere: More nice ferret stuff, this time from Lisa Wogan in the Seattle Times. … Also, I missed this USA Today piece by Julie Schmitt (who partnered on a lot of pet-food recall pieces) on the problems at the Chino, Calif., slaughterhouse that prompted the biggest beef recall in history. (Hmmm … icky juxtaposition with pet-treat recipes, but I don’t want to start another post.)
And: Don’t get too excited about locally grown foods. From the NYT:
If you’ve stood in line at a farmers’ market recently, you know that the local food movement is thriving, to the point that small farmers are having a tough time keeping up with the demand.
But consumers who would like to be able to buy local fruits and vegetables not just at farmers’ markets, but also in the produce aisle of their supermarket, will be dismayed to learn that the federal government works deliberately and forcefully to prevent the local food movement from expanding. And the barriers that the United States Department of Agriculture has put in place will be extended when the farm bill that House and Senate negotiators are working on now goes into effect.
Seems the gov’t should be promoting healthy food from local farmers. But maybe that’s just me.
I don’t have a recipe to add, but I’ve been making the liver brownies that Dorene posted for about two years now and I can’t say enough about how much my dogs love them. I learned about them when I was showing one of my dogs who is sooo NOT food motivated, but he loves these and was one of the only was I could keep his attention. I made a batch and froze all but one square at a time, they last for a while. And yes it STINKS when you are cooking them!
Comment by Jess — March 2, 2008 @ 1:13 pm
Monday [tomorrow] is the last day to tell the USDA that “naturally raised” should MEAN naturally raised.
More info here:
http://lassiegethelp.blogspot......to-by.html
and here, at The Ethicurean:
http://www.ethicurean.com/2008.....l_comment/
Comment by Luisa — March 2, 2008 @ 2:04 pm
I’ve been making dog treats for years and one thing I figured out is that I don’t actually need a recipe to make a treat the dogs will like. I can improvise and for me - that works! One recipe ‘guideline’ I often use is this:
-equal amounts of whole wheat flour and rolled oats
-about 1/3 that amount of peanut butter
-enough liquid to make a dough
Directions: Stir until dough forms, roll dough onto cookie sheet, slice through w/pizza cutter to make size treats you want, bake.
Tips & Tricks:
-Waste not, want not. I hate throwing anything away. If possible, I try to use it. Water that has been used to boil veggies or meat in works great for making treat dough.
-Treat recipes all come out soft when baked. To harden, shut oven off when done and leave biscuits in overnight with door closed.
Comment by slt — March 2, 2008 @ 4:33 pm
I do pretty much the same as slt. I vary it by switching liver or baby food for the pb, if you want a soft cookie type treat,sub wheat germ for the flour.I use organic whole wheat, rice or oat flour for the roughage. If you skip the pb, you can add eggs & meat broth too. Just don’t do the leave in the oven if theres meat in them.They need to be refridgerated or frozen. I made chopped dry roasted peanut & banana biscotti for them last month. Make the dough,form into logs & bake. Cool,slice & rebake,let sit in oven to harden & then drizzle with pb glaze.[I melted pb with a little bit of crisco & white chocolate chips for the glaze. White choc is not really choc, but go light because of the sugar content.]These & poultry baby food or liver seem to be the favorites. You can add mint & parsley also for a breath treat.
Comment by Leslie k — March 2, 2008 @ 8:23 pm
Biscotti drizzled with PB glaze?! O your dogs are lucky to have such a hardworking dogMom!
: )
I am so lazy when it comes to treats. I pretty much go for the “put everything in a bowl and stir it up” style recipes - less things to wash, hehe. Other foods that the dogs seem to like in addition to peanut butter (and which can be used in place of PB or in various combos): canned pumpkin, applesauce, shredded cheese, cream cheese, molasses, over ripe bananas… I know there’s more but that’s all I can think of at the mo.
Corn bread is also popular here (and with the lazy cook too). ; )
Comment by slt — March 3, 2008 @ 1:33 pm
OK, here’s my wife’s salmon cookie recipe…
Actually she got it out of the Lakeshore Humane Society news letter.
1 - 15oz can of salmon with the juice.
2 1/2 cups flour
2 tsp salt (but she has this crossed out)
Mix ingredients together. Add enough flour to make a firm dough. Press and pat out onto a greased cookie sheet. Score lighly in a criss cross pattern to make breaking into pieces easier.
Bake at 350 deg for about 30 min (she says 40 for crispier cookies). Cool, break into pieces and store in the fridge.
Here’s my recipe for great doggie treats! Take some food off your plate and toss it to them!
Both Scout and Brandy would eat pretty much anything I tossed them… :-)
Comment by Bernard J. (Bernie) Starzewski — March 4, 2008 @ 7:48 pm
Please thank your wife for sharing this, Bernie, and thank you for mentioning it! Lucky Scoutie! Now I’ll be baking this weekend!
Comment by Nadine L. — March 4, 2008 @ 9:01 pm