Tuesday, September 1, 2015

My home made dog food.

Yeah, nothing to do with gardening, but lately our garden has been changing due to our having adopted a greyhound just over a year ago. There are more spaces being made for the long legged dog to run around in. We have started fostering greys too, one sweet girl at a time. (Update, we are keeping one of them).

To make one large pot of dog food, about 8 take away containers full.

Ingredients
- 1 cup of white rice
- half a cup of pearl barley
- half a cup of orange lentils

- about 1000 ml water

- 200 -250 grams each of carrots (2-3 carrots)
- potato (roughly 1 large or 2 smaller ones)
- sweet potato (a decent chunk)
- pumpkin
- or some combo of the above four veg, diced fairly small

- a sprinkle of curry powder and/or herbs to make it smell better
turmeric and black pepper just in case it really is good for them, parsley if you have it
- 300-500 grams of mince or pre pulped dog mince (ie mince for dogs).

Method
Let the rice and vegies cook for 20-30 minutes, stirring occasionally so the rice doesn't stick.
When you are fairly sure the rice is cooked, add the mince and stir it through.
Cook for another 10-20 minutes to make sure it is all cooked through.

Scoop into containers once cooled a little,

I keep a few in the fridge and defrost when I start to run out.

Bear is about 30 kg and will have between 2/3 to 1 container for dinner.

This amount of food costs less than $10 for 8-12 meals.

For breakfast we give him 2 or 3 chicken wings and a few frozen mulies from the deli fishing bait freezer or sardines if we can get them cheap.

Meaty bones are always raw and we make sure they get put in the bin or compost after a day or so as dry bones wear the dog's teeth more and will get stolen by rats.

Sometimes he gets a few biscuits but not all that often.
For training treats/bribes we use biltong, which probably has less dodgy ingredients than schmackos or similar.