If you are a regular reader, you know I cook lunch for Kody every day, and he gets Merrick Turducken kibble out of a Canine Genius in the evening.
I don’t feel that cooking for a dog is necessary by any means, but it just makes me feel good that he’s getting “real food” and I cook for myself at the same time. But preparation is definitely the key. In this other post about dog food preparation I talk about how I portion and freeze in advance the hamburger and rice that Kody eats so that cooking is pretty easy.
I have refined the portioning process since then. I smoosh the hamburger pieces into patties so they will cook faster than cubes. I started using a small portioning scoop, like an ice cream scoop only smaller, which I purchased at a restaurant supply store to quickly scoop rice balls out of the rice cooker to put on parchment lined cookie sheet to freeze. Once frozen, the rice balls will no longer stick to each other and they go in a ziploc freezer bag.
Today I made an improvement to the cooking process to speed it up. Once you start cooking like this every day, improvements just sort of occur to me when I’m ready to make them.
I used to put some water in a small frying pan along with the meat and rice. I would set the heat to 4 (out of 10) and set the timer for four minutes. When it went off, I would flip the hamburger and set the timer for another four minutes. So eight minutes but I would get Kody’s water replaced and clean his food bowl during that time, but there was still some time where I was just waiting.
As I get to be a better cook for me, that gets passed on to Kody as well. Now I use the same small frying pan sprayed with PAM cooking spray. I set it to preheat with the stove set to 6 (out of 10), so a little hotter, and I clean Kody’s food bowl and get him fresh water. After that, the pan is preheated, so I throw in the frozen hamburger and rice ball. The rice doesn’t do much, but the hamburger cooks pretty quickly. After about a minute, it’s ready to be flipped. Unlike the old process, the hamburger is now a little browned and smells very good.
After the other side cooks for a minute, I pour in a little water (3 or 4 tablespoons) and place a cover on the pan. The water does 3 important things. First it deglazes the pan so all that great beef taste is released. Second it adds liquid which will form a little bit of a gravy. Third, and most importantly, along with the cover, the steam that’s created defrosts the rice after about a minute.
Then I use my spatula to chop up the hamburger, mix it all around with the rice, put it into his dish, and set it aside to cool for a few minutes. While waiting for it to cool, I clean the pans. If you cook be sure to cool the food. You should be able to comfortably stir it with your fingers, if you can’t either let it set longer or blow on it and stir with your fingers until it’s just warm.
So the cooking process went down from 8 minutes to 3 minutes. That’s pretty good! Cooking for your dog just feels rewarding. That’s why so many people do it, and others spend a lot more time at it than I do. Like any cooking you start off doing it slowly and inefficiently, but then you get faster and better over time. I also do it at a time I’m cooking for myself anyway so it kind of just fits in. It’s still extra time, but not much.