Gimme your dog-food recipes!

Cafe Society
1

It seems that I have strangely inherited a dog. Well, she was my puppy, but after a relationship split The Ex wanted to keep her, desperately. All had been good for the last four years, but over the weekend just gone, I was delivered a dog. Hmmm…

Anyway, it seems that doggie doesn’t actually LIKE the food that The Ex lumped on me (with the dog). And the poor girl desperately needs to lose a bit (a LOT) of weight…so I’m doing beach runs in the morning with her, and my daughter and grandies are doing ‘school runs’ and park runs in the later afternoons. We’ve also (obviously) cut out feeding her under the table (like The Ex was wont to do) and making sure she’s not snaffling food from under our noses

So can you gimme your doggie recipes? I’ve currently got lamb off-cuts brewing away with rice, broccoli, carrot and potato in the slow-cooker. Should be ready by morning and will probably do her for a couple of days. But I’m sure you lot who’ve reared doggies will have plenty of creative ideas (as cheaply as possible of course).

Thanks, and WOOF. :slight_smile:

2

The last year and a half of my dog’s life (she lived to be a little over 18), she couldn’t eat dried dog food anymore and desperately needed to put on weight with something nutritious. So I started cooking for her and made a big batch of stew every month which I stored in the fridge in pitchers.

Unmilled barley (LOTS of fiber!), organ meat (kidneys, liver) cut up very fine, and mixed veg (always frozen—LOTS of vitamins!). I would make the broth by first baking and then boiling soup bones (beef or lamb) until all the marrow was out and the liquid was very thick (LOTS of protein!).

I should eat so good! This diet kept her in good health until she finally passed away from old age.

3

Holy cow! Your doggies are lucky. Some months (like this one), after buying Mom’s medications there isn’t enough money to even buy us some food.

4

The only time we’ve cooked for our dogs is when they had an upset tummy. In which case the old standby of white rice and chicken, and add some Pedialyte to their water.

Out of curiosity, why not get some healthy dog food? They all have weight control varieties. My beagles get Avoderm and I’ve heard nothing but good about Blue Buffalo products.

5

Overweight? Won’t eat dog food?

The ex fed her people food, table scraps, etc. My aged mother does the same thing, and every time she does, no matter how small the morsel, the dog won’t eat dog food for another 24 hours or so. Buy her good quality dog food and withhold treats/ppl food. You might want to get her checked, though, to make sure her teeth are OK and not preventing her from eating dry food.

6

Everything I listed I got dirt cheap at an Asian supermarket. Far less expensive than buying commercial dog food.

7

Yowza. The idea of spending the next 10 years cooking up dogfood a few times a week because my dog was fussy makes my head explode. I agree with a couple of the above recommendations -cut out scraps and/or shpp around for a different brand. If you want to go for it, basically I think all there is to it is a simple stew, minus the ingrediants that aren’t good for dogs like onions and garlic. My previous dog, I did the chicken or beef & rice a few times as he had recurring stomach problems.

8

My sick dog (13 year old Standard Poodle with cancer) gets warmed-up chicken and rice on her food in the morning, canned dog food on her evening meal, and satin balls mixed in with her food at her last meal of the day. But she needs weight. The other dogs get their food weighed out 3 times a day, with maybe 1 T of canned food added in the evenings. I don’t feed scraps, because with 6 dogs it takes a lot of scraps to go around!

But it’s important that I weigh their kibble - I tweak it if any start to look thin or fat. You’d think that 1 C of kibble would always equal 120 gm, or whatever, but it seemed too variable.

StG

9

When my dog was on an elimination diet, she started on white rice and (canned) salmon. No reaction for several days, and we added sweet potatoes and switched to brown rice. No reaction. We added tuna. Cheaper than salmon. No reaction. We allowed some soup bones she could chew on, and boiled them first, and use the broth for cooking the rice.

Then we added in this order:
red potatoes
babyfood oatmeal (in the box) for the vitamims
chopped green veggies, like spinach and broccoli
cottage cheese
brewer’s yeast (dog LOVED a bowl of chopped veggies and potatoes boiled in beef brother, mixed with cottage cheese and brewer’s yeast. She sucked it down so fast, you weren’t sure you’d actually given it to her)
peanut butter, given with trepidation, because it’s a doggie fave, but no reaction
corn.

WOW. Massive reaction. Corn was the culprit. So we found a dry food with no corn, and got that for her. She wanted her tuna and cottage cheese again, so we had no mix some into the hard food, and fade it until after two months, she was just eating the food.

I suspect if your dog had all those things, minus the corn, of course, and with the addition of some mutton or hamburger, the dog would have everything it needs. You can use low-fat cottage cheese-- we used full fat, because our dog was thin. If your dog can’t tolerate it-- ours was barely a year old, and still probably had some milk-digesting enzymes-- you could try yogurt, or look for lactose-free cottage cheese. Or add lactaid. I wouldn’t use fat-free, because the vitamins in the veggies need some fat to be absorbed correctly. Course, I suppose if you fry them in some kind of oil your dog can tolerate, you wouldn’t need any dairy at all.

You could probably use human oatmeal, not baby oatmeal flakes.

If your dog can tolerate corn, I understand it’s a good source of roughage.

Many dogs are allergic to chicken, but not turkey; however, good luck getting turkey outside of Oct-Jan.

Talk to your vet about what your dog’s needs are, and them look for the vitamins the dog needs. We had to give a phosphorus supplement in the beginning.

The dog in question that I did this for lived to be 15 1/2, which was really old for a dog her size. (70 lbs.) She would run, hike, swim, chase and wrestle with other, younger dogs right up until her last couple of weeks, and she had good eyesight; she could spot a squirrel running through the yard from out our third floor window.

10

My dog also won’t eat dry food, and it’s actually cheaper to cook for her than buy canned food (plus she loves it).

I buy a ten pound bag of leg quarters and cook it in the crockpot overnight. Then I stir it all up and pick the bones out with tongs (much easier with legs than whole chicken) and ladle it into tupperware for the freezer. I cook one of these dog food bases with a can of peas and a can of green beans, a package of gizzards or hearts, and a half cup of rice, then I throw in a half cup of oatmeal when the rice is done and turn it off. This lasts about five days or so. The ten pounds of leg quarters makes enough starter for a month. I put the recipe into My Fitness Pal and it has the right nutrition for a dog.

It’s a minor pain, but we have to cook for ourselves anyway, and our dog is kind of “special needs.” Some might say, “It’s a dog, it’ll eat when it gets hungry” but I don’t want to be forced to eat something I hate, or starve. She knows when we are cooking for her, and it makes her very happy.