Thursday 5 March 2015

Lizzing Lightly's Homemade Dog Food Recipe

As mentioned in dog allergies and sustainable meat choices we choose to make our own dog food to reduce our pooches impact on the environment and give them good quality food.  Feel free to use and adapt this recipe for your own fur babies.  I would love to hear if they like it!

Ingredients:


4 tbsp olive oil
Leftover vegetables: try to include something green and some sweet potato or pumpkin but whatever you have in the house will often do.
2 x 375 g can of beans.  We usually use kidney beans but chickpeas, cannelloni or four bean mix is fine.
2 kg Kangaroo mince.  We buy human grade from the supermarket for convenience but the pet grade is sufficient and much cheaper.
2-3 cups of rice or pasta (or any filler you wish to use).  Add more if you want the mixture to go a bit further.
Approximately 8 cups of water (enough to just cover vegetables and meat in your saucepan)
Optional:
1 or 2 can(s) of tomatoes
2 tsp of vegetable stock or gravox

Method:


1. Roughly chop up leftover veggies to a size that you think is manageable for your dog.
2. Drain and rinse the cans of beans that you have selected.
3. Place your largest saucepan on a high heat.  Add the oil and allow to heat up, then add the kangaroo mince.  Fry the mince on a high heat, mixing regularly to break it up into smallish lumps.
4. After the meat is browned and cooked add veggies and stir through allowing heat to penetrate.
5. After the mixture is heated through add the water along with the stock or gravox if you want to add this (be careful not to add too much salt).  Then add the rinsed beans.  If you are adding canned tomatoes then do this at the same time as the beans.  Mix well.
6. Add the rice or pasta to the mix.  After the mixture begins to bubble reduce the heat so that it simmers away.
7. Cook for about half an hour, until liquid is absorbed and rice or pasta and veggies are cooked through, stirring occasionally so that the bottom doesn't stick and burn.  Leave to cool and then serve into plastic containers for putting into the fridge or freezing.

This recipe makes about 21 cups of dog food.

Each of our Jack Russells will eat a bowl of this (approximately 1.5 cups) each night.  So the two of them eat about 3 cups each night.  This means that the mixture makes enough for 7 nights.  However, it lasts longer (probably 2-3 weeks) for us since we also feed the dogs our leftovers and the occasional packet of free range chicken wings.  We always have dog biscuits in the house to tide us over when we run out between batches.

This recipe costs approximately $30 to make (we pay about $20 for the kangaroo meat alone) so that works out to about $4.30 per day as the sole food source for 1 week.  Buying pet grade meat would reduce the cost by about half. After looking at the savings I feel more motivated to go out of my way to buy pet grade meat!

3 comments:

  1. Great post, thanks. Just wondering why you cook the kangaroo meat? I cook the vegies and rice, but leave the meat raw. Cheers.

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    Replies
    1. Hi, thanks for visiting. Great question! The only reason we cook the kangaroo meat is because it lasts longer without smelling in the fridge. But we used to give our older dog raw meat all of the time before we went through the desensitisation process for her allergies. I've just done a quick search on raw vs. cooked and cannot find a winner out of the two. The only thing I noticed was that when feeding dogs raw meat generally sites recommended using human grade meat.. We have fed our dogs the kangaroo raw if we haven't gotten around to making the mixture and it does get smelly in 1kg lots. I think you make a good point though and might also try doing the mixture without the meat and freezing batches with the human grade raw meat next time I buy it since I'm using pet grade at the moment.. I'll see if they like it

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    2. http://justfoodfordogs.com/learning/raw-vs-cooked/

      http://rawfed.com/myths/cookedfood.html

      http://www.pawnation.com/2012/03/30/raw-dog-food-vs-cooked-dog-food/

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