Cooking for Your Dog

Today we cooked for Bailey.

I shouldn’t even blog about this until we get the process simplified. But I promised to tell the truth about our switch to holistic pet care, so here it is: blood, guts, chicken liver, and all.

For our first home-cooked meal, we went with The Whole Pet Diet’s Spot’s Stew. You need a 10-qt stock pot, and then you just slow-simmer an organic chicken, a bunch of whole grains (we used 10 oz of quinoa) and some coarsely chopped zucchini, squash, celery, carrots, green beans, garlic, rosemary, kelp powder, and sweet potatoes. Piece o’ cake.

The stew was the bomb, and we couldn’t help serving ourselves as well as Bailey. "Tonight, Bo, we eat like kings!" You’d be surprised how much bulk the quinoa adds. Bailey couldn’t finish what we gave him, and we’re stuffed with days’ worth of leftovers in the fridge.

But the post-game analysis is to avoid cooking chicken.

The problem is you have to debone it. And even after you’ve done that thoroughly, there are still bones left hiding. I guarantee it. We thought we were done deboning, and we’d even served Bailey his dish, when we started scooping the rest out … only to find a hidden bone. Damn it.

We looked at each other, guilt-ridden for shortcutting the recipe, and decided in unison: we gotta do the Cuisinart puree. Small batch by small batch. We scooped out some broth, added some chicken, and added some of the quinoa/veggie mixture. Pulse. Scoop out. Repeat.

It was a total pain in the ass. And our kitchen was hit! Suffice it to say we spent the ENTIRE day hunting and gathering ingredients, and the ENTIRE night stewing, pureeing, measuring, storing, and cleaning. And neither of us wants to eat what this dish morphed into: pureed, baby food crap. We hope Bailey still likes it!

Whole truth: it was fun. Temple is a willing and even supportive, enthusiastic participant.
And today was a Saturday. We didn’t have anything else to do. And we are enjoying lavishing Bailey with love and attention.

But next time, we cook beef. Same stew recipe. But no puree. We throw shit in, we simmer, we go.