Doxie News Dachshund Blog

I talked about it yesterday, but I've come to the latest stage in making it easy to cook for Kody and thought I'd post about it. This is how a make one of Kody's two meals a day. The other meal is dry kibble fed out of a Canine Genius. Kody is about 15 pounds, for your reference.

The Meat

Buy ground beef or ground chicken or whatever meat you want and shape one pound of it into a square. Then cut three times both ways and you'll have 16 one ounce portions. Put some parchment paper on a cookie sheet (because it's wonderfully non-stick) put the ground meat on the parchment and smoosh each piece down a little. Flatter pieces cook faster than chunks. Then freeze these and when they're frozen take them off the cookie sheet and throw the pieces into a Ziploc bag. Once they're frozen they won't stick to each other.

The Rice

Just cook rice in a rice cooker, which is the fastest and easiest way. After you have the rice and water measured properly in the rice cooker bowl, throw in some chopped vegetables like carrots, celery, and/or mushrooms for added flavor and nutrition. Once the rice is done use a small ice cream scoop, which you can buy at a restaurant supply (cheaper) or fancy kitchen store (more expensive). Use the same method of parchment paper on a cookie sheet and then drop the rice scoops on and freeze. Once frozen, put them all in a Ziploc bag and back in the freezer.

If you start cooking for your dog regularly you'll run out of rice and meat on different days so you'll only have to do one of these tasks in a single day. Most days, of course, you won't do either.

The cooking

When you're ready to cook, get a small pan, add two tablespoons of water, one ounce of the frozen meat and one frozen rice ball. Put a cover on the pan, this is important because it's the trapped steam the does the cooking. Set the burner heat to 6 (out of 10) and the timer to 5 minutes. When the timer goes off, remove the lid and use a wooden spatula to chop up the meat and rice and stir it around to mix. Then throw it in the dog dish, set aside to cool, and set the timer for 5 more minutes.

Once the timer goes off, stir the food with your fingers and blow if it's too hot. Be sure it's plenty cool for your dog, they don't have the self control to stop eating if it's too hot and will easily burn their mouth, so err towards the cool side. What's the perfect temperature? That of a freshly dead animal, of course!

Your dog will love this more than anything else you could give them. This is something even you would actually eat. You would prepare it differently for yourself, probably, but you'd eat the exact same thing. So why do dog food makers make their food so stinky and gross? Unfortunately, probably to hide the poor quality of their ingredients.