Homemade Dog Food

Since I made my just about monthly batch of dog food today, I've decided to post the recipe. It's not set in stone and you can change it up a bit, so long as you do not ever use garlic and onion in it.

3lbs lean ground beef (1.99/2.99 per pound)
1lb dry pearled barley (1.99)
2lbs carrots (2.49)
2lbs potatoes (approx 1.oo)
vegetable stock, enough to cover the ingredients throughout cooking (varies, sometimes I just use homemade)
1/4 soy sauce (approx .50)
1/2 head of celery (.75)

I use the biggest stock pot I own, which by stock pot standards it's not the largest out there. Carrots, potatoes and celery get chopped up thinly and tossed into the pot. Next all of the beef and soy sauce. Then I put it on the stove and fill to 1 inch below the rim with stock, probably about 12 cups worth. I let it simmer for an hour after it comes to a boil, then when that's up, I dump in the barley and simmer for another 90 minutes.

This then gets separated into 270g portions and frozen. I use ziptop lunch bags, flattened out so they can be stacked easily. This batch lasts my dog (half lab, half american bulldog) about 20 days or so, and she's a big eater. It gets mixed into Purina's Beneful dry food, with a half cup of stock per night.

Pia loves it so much, that she literally licks her bowl clean and will carry it out to the living room in attempts to guilt me into feeding her more, but she's just a glutton.

The recipe is kind of basic, and you can swap brown rice for the barley, any lean meat for the beef, and other veggies for the carrots, but mine loves carrots so I haven't tried anything else.

Pia, the pain.

Pia, the beloved mutt, won't stop eating twigs. The end result? She's having poop issues. On my carpet. That I just shampooed. So, instead of working more rows of my Storm Cloud Shawlette, I'll be logging off to clean.

She's half lab, and really, I should have known better. The only other lab I've had ate half of a picnic bench, and that was entirely my parent's fault for leaving her unattended with it. Unfortunately for us, she won't outgrow the Labs Will Eat Everything stage. At least she hasn't behaved this way at other people's houses. Just like the toddler, she saves all of the bad behavior for home.