Homecooked Meals

I'm in a short recess between semesters, and of course, I can't actually take a break for some stupid reason, so I've taken on a bunch of projects. One of which is my new plan for feeding the dogs: homecooked meals.

You may remember that last year's raw food experiment was a failure, for a number of reasons. For example, I'm a germ-o-phobe, and it bothered me to no end to watch the dogs put their paws all over raw chunks of meat, then walk around our house. I was baby-wiping their feet after every meal.

Also, Star hates raw meat. Hates it. When offered raw meat, she runs off, hunched over, head down, tail between her legs—as if we just offered her a beating.

But commercial kibble has its share of problems too. The recent food recalls. The mysterious shortage of rabbit that makes it impossible to keep Dozer on a rabbit-only diet. The 25-lb bag of food that costs nearly $60.

So I'm compromising. I'm cooking.

I bought six chickens at the store last weekend.

It's really difficult to cram six chickens into the fridge. I got three in the meat drawer, and three where the milk should go.

Waaaaiiit a minute, you're saying. Isn't Dozer allergic to most meat proteins? Isn't that the point of the special, expensive, impossible-to-find rabbit-based kibble?

Well, here's the thing. We didn't experiment much with the food allergy. The dermatology/allergy vet started us on the rabbit-based food, and things improved, so we assumed that rabbit was the key.

• Dozer was originally eating Natural Balance Limited Ingredient kibble of various flavors, and he was reacting to it. The meat proteins varied, and the starch/binder was usually rice or potato.
• With the derm vet, we started him on Royal Canin Veterinary Diet, which is rabbit and potato. He was still getting staph infections, but it was much improved.
• Then we switched to Instinct—rabbit and tapioca—and the staph infections cleared up.
• Instinct then ran out of rabbits, so Dozer currently eats Natural Balance Alpha, which uses a combo of lamb, chicken, and rabbit, and the binder is chickpeas. He's still doing great.

So I wondered, why isn't Dozer reacting to the chicken and lamb in the Alpha?

Perhaps, it's not actually a meat protein allergy, it's a starch/gluten problem. That is, perhaps Dozer is allergic to starches like grains, rice, and potato, but does fine with gluten-free binders like tapioca and chickpeas.

Makes sense to me.

Under this theory, I could switch Dozer to some non-rabbit-based, gluten-free dog food, which would be easier to find. Trouble is, most of the foods made with gluten-free binders are still RIDICULOUSLY F-ING EXPENSIVE. But, yes, I am considering this possibility.

In the meantime, I'm testing the theory that home-cooked meals might be a cheaper solution.

I cooked four of the chickens at once. I wanted to cook all six, but my pans weren't big enough.

These chickens are nothing fancy. Wash them off, rub some olive oil on them, put them in a 425-degree oven for about 1.5 hours.

Don't they look good?? Yeah, we thought so too. So we ate some chicken for dinner! In fact, it was kind of awesome, because with only one chicken, Byrd and I would fight over the dark meat, but this time we could each have our fill of legs and thighs.

Dozer stood next to me in the kitchen and drooled while I pulled all the meat off the chicken bones for storage. (Cooked chicken bones are NOT safe for dogs to eat.)

I got a total of 8 pounds of meat off the 4 chickens. And that was after we ate at least a pound ourselves for dinner. The chickens were $5-6 each. It comes out to about $2.50-$3 per pound.

I think the kibble probably costs just a little bit less. :(

But then again, I've never seen the dogs so excited about their dinner.

Recently, we also found a new dehydrated dog food that is gluten-free and rabbit protein, and it smells delicious when you add hot water. It's about the same price as kibble. But storage is much easier because the bag is smaller, yet it still makes the same amount of food as a big bag of kibble. Modern technology!

Currently, we're doing a hybrid sort of meal. The dogs get kibble as a base. They get a serving of re-hydrated food, some cooked chicken, and a supplement. They also get various snacks during the day, like cottage cheese, egg, or chicken livers. I won't pretend it's a balanced meal, but at the moment, it's an experiment to see what they can eat without Dozer breaking out with staph and Star running away like a coward.

Pepper and Little Byrd

Ten years ago, Byrd and I lived in a little condo community. One of our neighbors was a single woman who worked all day, and while she was away at work, she let her little dog run loose.

This was both annoying for all the residents and dangerous for the little dog, because it liked to chase cars in the parking lot, bark, and poo everywhere. The woman probably thought her cute little dog slept all day on her front porch, because that's where the dog was when she left, and that's where it was when she came home (it could hear her car coming and would race to her front door to wait for her).

So since I was a college kid at the time, I "adopted" the dog during the day. It got to hang out with me inside while I was home. The first thing I did was give it a bath and brush it, because it smelled terrible and had fleas.

We soon learned that the dog's name was Pepper, because when the woman got home in the evening and discovered her dog was not waiting on the front porch, she started screaming "PEPPER!!! PEPPER!!!" I let Pepper out the back door and he ran around the unit to the front to greet his mom, and they went inside.

This was a routine until Pepper's mom finally figured out where her dog was spending time. Then she would come over and knock on our door each evening and retrieve Pepper from us. It seemed she sort of appreciated the free petsitting.

During this time we also ended up with a baby chicken that was dumped at the pet store where Byrd worked (sound familiar? See Fred's story). We named the chick Little Byrd.

Little Byrd and Pepper became friends. Pepper watched out for LB when he was having some free time in the yard.

LB turned out to be a huge black rooster (sound familiar? See Peepers's story).

Now, the difference between LB and Peepers is that LB could and would fly. He often flew over the condo's backyard fence and into neighboring back yards. Another problem was that we were not really allowed to have fowl in the condos. And LB crowed, too!

So Byrd managed to find a farm that would take not-so-Little Byrd. He *claims* it was a rooster heaven where Little Byrd had lots of hens to call his own. But I'm a bit suspicious, since he makes this farm sound more and more wonderful each time he reassures me that he did not send LB to be made into someone's dinner.

The Chicken and the Vacation

Two exciting events are unfolding around here that are (finally) unrelated to dogs in any way...

Chicken

First, we have a new member of the household, a little baby chicken. I've always planned to have chickens someday, but things rarely go as planned around here, especially when we have a reputation in the neighborhood as "the people who rescue strange animals." None of our neighbors have forgotten the beautiful and hilarious Pekin ducks we used to have, and so when this new barnyard fowl somehow ended up in the neighbor's yard (we have two different chicken flocks that roam our neighborhood, which is a strange sight since we're in a well-established neighborhood), they happily handed it over to us, knowing we would know how to care for it.

So after some preparations, the chick is now settled into Dozer's old dog run, and it seems to be doing really well. It's scratched up, maybe from a cat or a car, which would explain why it was alone when it was found, but otherwise happy and healthy and perky. It loves Byrd and it even follows Dozer around; we can't help but remember our lively duck Fred when he was a little bitty baby. I wonder if this is a boy or a girl? We won't know until it starts to crow--or lay eggs!

We're going to get at least one, maybe two, more chickens as soon as is feasible. Those two will be planned and carefully picked; I've found a breeder of the type of chicken that I want, that lays the type of eggs that I want, so there won't be any Mystery surrounding them. Plus, the breeder has some chicks that are the same approximate age as our Mystery Chick, so they aren't like day olds, which require indoor care for quite a while.

I thought a chicken blog would be interesting so I can record pictures and events as the chick grows up... and we find out whether it's a boy or a girl, and what it will look like... so it's at http://achicken.wordpress.com

Vacation

And that brings us to the next thing: our vacation! Yes, a real live vacation. Byrd and I haven't been on a vacation for... well, eight years or so, if you don't count our honeymoon (a two-day excursion to San Antonio, not much of a trip). We're going on a cruise in the Caribbean, which should be entertaining considering all the hurricanes down there right now. But we are leaving on next Sunday and won't be back for a week. I'm really looking forward to it!

Dozer is going to stay here at home, and my mom is going to move in and take care of him and the chicken while we're away. So this next week I've actually got to do a lot of work. Not just packing, but also shopping and cleaning and writing care instructions and labeling cabinets and light switches and so forth, so Mom will know where everything is. The bad thing is that while we are on the cruise, we probably won't have any cell phone reception and we definitely won't have Internet access, so once we're gone, we're really gone for the whole week.

Poor Dozer, this will be the first time we have both left the house for such an extended period of time. I'm so glad Mom will be here with him, but she is not a dog person at all, and Dozer really needs to have a confident leader to tell him what to do or else he just falls to pieces. I sure hope things go okay or else I might not have a dog sitter anymore for future vacations.

Lye Burn

And as a side note, I did a really stupid thing considering I'm about to go on a cruise and I'll be wearing shorts and a swimsuit almost the whole time--I managed to get a nasty lye burn on both my knees! We just laid some concrete (for our fence--pictures and such to come at a later date), and I was helping to "finish" it by scrubbing it with water and a big stone thing. Well, after kneeling on the concrete for nearly an hour, I realized that the pain in my knees wasn't actually from kneeling on a hard surface--it was a burning feeling... and sure enough, when I pulled up my jeans (which were soaking wet and covered with concrete), my knees were red and blistered. Now I can only hope these oozing blisters will heal up in five days. :( Well, I guess the good thing is that it got me out of the rest of the job because I had to go shower straightaway!