Home (dog food) cooking

So, in our eternal quest to get and keep the Kaylee-girl healthy (and lower the vet bills!), I decided to start cooking her a homemade diet, reasoning that the fewer preservatives the better, and anything I make should be more easily digested than hard kibble.

I did some research and finally found a really good book at my library, Better Food for Dogs: A Complete Cookbook and Nutrition Guide by David Bastin, Grant Nixon & Jennifer Ashton. Except for some of the propaganda in the front, it's an incredibly well-researched book. It lays out recipes by dog weight, as well as nutrient needs, so it's very easy to use. It also gives lots of options for substitutions, which is great to add a little variety to Kay's diet.

Since I'm looking for an easily-digestible diet, I stuck to the basic diet, with some variations. The recipe I use for Kaylee (a forty-pound dog) is:

Protein (pick one):

4.25 cups white-meat turkey
4 cups white-meat chicken
12 scrambled or hard-boiled eggs
4 cups 1% cottage cheese (no additional salt)

Grain (pick one):

3 cups rice
3 cups barley
4 cups oatmeal

Plus:

2.25 cups fruit & veg mix*
2 Tbsp olive oil
1/2 tsp iodized salt
1/2 tsp potassium chloride
2 tsp bonemeal
4 tsp each multivitamin & multimineral**

She's supposed to get one fourth of that at each meal, but it took her too long to eat and she would get frstrated and give up. So now she gets one eighth at each meal and gets a half cup of Nature's Recipe Easy-to-Digest Lamb Meal, Rice & Barley kibble, too. I'd prefer not to feed her the kibble at all, but since the homemade stuff is soft, it just takes her a long time to snarf it out of the bowl, and she doesn't finish it.

We tried salmon as a protein, but not only was that expensive, it was a little too oily for Kaylee's digestive system to handle. So that's out. We're sticking to the poultry and eggs for now. I try to keep at least two different types of meals in the freezer so I can rotate what she's eating to make sure she's getting all her nutrients.

As for cost, it really hasn't been all that expensive. Poultry goes on sale all the time, and three split chicken breasts provide 4 cups of chicken, and a 7-pound bone-in turkey breast provides at least 4.25 cups of turkey. And a dozen eggs, even free-range, are pretty cheap. If it can help keep her healthy, then it's sure as hell cheaper than the vet bills!

I wish I could do this for the other dogs, too (they do get about a tablespoon hidden under their kibble at each meal, just to placate them), but it's pretty time consuming, even for Kaylee, and they'd probably eat even more, since they're both bigger than her. If I didn't work, I'd probably do it - Kaylee seems to be doing really well on it! (Knock on wood!!!)

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NOTE: I am not a dog nutrition expert by any means, and I won't answer questions that you may have about dog nutrition. Go ask your vet or at the very least, go read the book referenced above. This diet is good for Kaylee, but probably won't be right for your dog. Talk to your vet, like I talked to mine, before you start your dog on a homecooked diet.

*Made by cooking and then processing the more easily digested fruits and veggies. I use frozen stuff, mostly, since it's cheaper. Kaylee usually gets 4-5 different veggies, including green beans, yellow wax beans, peas, carrots, sweet potatoes, peaches, apples and strawberries.

**I've forgotten what brand of multivitamin/multimineral I use, but I found it at Whole Foods. It's a liquid and it's in two separate bottles. I'll try to remember to look at the bottle sometime soon. It's called Nature's Answer.

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