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.

The Old Cooking Process

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.

The New Improved Process

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.

Yesterday, though, we went to go for a walk and as soon as I opened the door Kody let out the loudest most intense bark I can imagine. It wasn’t a quick bark, it was the howl/scream bark, sort of like “Arrrroooooooo-woof-woof!”, but really loud. When you’re not prepared for this bark it shakes your soul and affects you for at least an hour afterward. Imagine if you were right next to a cute happy baby and then without warning this baby let out the most horrible scream it could and started crying violently. Or like those internet video clips that scare you by being quiet and then having some horrible ghoul scream all of a sudden. It’s very difficult to describe in words, but maybe some of you know what I’m talking about.

I don’t consider this “bad behavior” necessarily, but it’s an unfortunate side effect of Kody. If he gets spooked in just the right way, he’ll do this. It’s usually some way that I could never ever predict. I think it was a strong scent he smelled because there was nothing to see and after that he was intensely smelling everything he could outside. I image some wild animal must have passed by or something.

Also, the Canine Genius is really working out. Kody eats his whole dinner from it now and has a great time. He’s really learning how to get the food out. I still sit with him just in case things get a little slow for him. It’s also just plain fun to watch. Then when he’s done I wash it and put it away for the next day. I’ve also noted that the size of the food is a big variable with this toy. If you can’t get the food in by just dropping it into the top, it’s not going to come out either. Our food seems to be the perfect size, but if you get one, just be aware of that. I also put in a little bit of Natural Balance Roll-a-Round I’ve broken up into small bits to make sure it stays interesting.

I can’t help but feel a little embarrassed to tell this story. Like many other people, I cook for my dog. Just the morning meal, but I still do it. I’ll admit, I definitely have the crazy gene that all of us who cook for our dogs have. Yes, I’m concerned about additives and hormones, especially for a small dog. And we’ve had stomach issues in the past I’m not eager to repeat, so I guess this might help. But honestly, I don’t think my cooking is significantly better than the high quality dog food Kody eats, but he loves it so much I just can’t stop.

Kody gets hamburger and rice and my goal is always to make it easier. I have thought about making a big batch of hamburger and rice and freezing portions of it, but the truth is thawing a big chunk of hamburger and rice is actually more difficult than doing this, if you do it right.

The trick is to make rice cubes and beef cubes. I buy organic ground beef for Kody at Costco. It’s too expensive for me to eat, but with the little that Kody eats it’s not that bad. Yes, my dog eats better ground beef than I do. It comes in one pound bricks that are easy to cut into 16 one ounce pieces. I place these on a pan on wax or parchment paper, freeze them, then put them in Ziploc bags and I’m set for 48 days of cooking. (The beef comes in a three pound package.)

For the rice, I use the rice cooker (easy), and make cubes out if it and freeze them too. You can use ice cube trays or basically the same process we used for the beef. I try to make the rice cubes about the same physical size as the beef cubes. This is for a 14 pound dachshund who gets some dry food in the evening also. It might be a good idea to just use these amounts and make up for the differences in dogs with the dry food.

Then every day, I grab the pan throw in a rice cube, a beef cube, four tablespoons of water and cooking on one notch below medium heat for 4 minutes. Then flip the beef cube and continue to cook for another four minutes. Then crush up the beef and rice and mix together, put in dog dish, and cool in the freezer for another four minutes.

Describing it takes more work than doing it. It’s basically pan, rice, beef, water, heat. Set timer. Flip. Set timer. Mix. Dish. Freezer. Set timer. Wash pan. Give food to dog.

Most of that time I’m actually at the computer working. This blog post was started during today’s cooking. Or sometimes I’ll prepare my own lunch at the same time.

The chewing and rolling in I kind of have down as Kody is doing pretty well with the “leave it” command. The eating is tough. Today Kody found what I think was an old chicken bone the birds had dropped. They also drop bits of broken glass, but luckily Kody isn’t interested in that. Anyway, it was a small piece of bone, or whatever it was, but he was able to crunch and eat it fairly quickly. I think my offer of a treat to trade actually made him swallow it faster.

I was so mad. Not because he was bad, but because now I’m kinda freaked out. What if this is the chicken bone that kills him? I’m hoping it was old enough or small enough that it’s fairly digestible since he got it down so fast, or that it wasn’t a chicken bone at all. But these are the times of stress. All you can do is hope and wait and try to relax. Be aware of the dog so if something goes wrong you can get him to the vet fast.

It’s hard to learn that you don’t have as much control as you’d like to have. Luckily, dogs seem to make it through eating stuff off the ground on a fairly regular basis.

I cook lunch for him every day and was sure that was the problem and so I cut back on that. Instead of a palmful of oatmeal, he gets one tablespoon. And about the same of chopped carrots. And then about 1.5 ounces of hamburger.

In the evening he gets just a half cup of Merrick dry food which is actually measured out now but that’s about the same as before. When he was getting bigger lunches he wouldn’t eat all the dry food I put out, now he eats it all which is a good sign that I’ve cut back his lunches enough. I think he’s losing weight, but it doesn’t have to happen fast. He’ll be weighed again in a month and if he hasn’t lost any weight we’ll cut back a little more.

But this morning I noticed something surprising. Kody already has a small Extreme Kong, but I bought him a new medium sized Classic Kong yesterday and it came with some free Kong treats. I was just about to throw them away because I figured they were full of chemicals. Then I noticed the package said “all natural”. I didn’t believe it so just to entertain myself I looked at the ingredients. OMG. They were not only truly all natural but they were actually really good ingredients for dogs. No corn, wheat, or soy. Here they are:

barley and spelt flours, gound oats, chicken meat, rice flour, chicken liver, canola oil, beet pulp, dried skim milk, apples, salmon oil, tumeric, tocopherols (natural source of vitamin E)

It’s nice to see that dog treat manufacturers are starting to use better ingredients. I will actually let my dog have these! The truth is, even with the better ingredients I’m sure they’re making a ton of profit, so why not?