Have Crockpot, Will Cook

It's been a little over a month since I've last written, and we've been busy with all sorts of things. The biggest project we've taken on recently has been re-roofing the house. I'm sure I'll post a later entry with all the gory details, but for now I'm enjoying the fact that we have a new, leak-free roof over our heads.

The other thing that's been consuming a bit of my time is doing further reading on home-cooking for Cragar. Since I was initially fuzzy on supplementing Cragar's diet with vitamins, calcium and other minerals, I decided I needed extra help. I ordered Dr. Pitcairn's Complete Guide to Natural Health for Dogs & Cats - a excellent resource for home cooking for pets. I read the section on diet and nutrition several times to make sure I understood before venturing into the unknown depths of a health food store (I think I've been in a health food store maybe twice in my life). Who would have thought that I'd be buying kelp powder to make a nutritional supplement for my dog? And on the subject of the powdered kelp, I realize that it contains iodine and other minerals, but as far as I'm concerned it should be called powdered ass, it smells so bad. Whew! I thought for sure Cragar would spit his food on the floor after I added the supplements to his food, but apparently he likes powdered ass.

The book has several recipes and ingredient substitutions. I can make the "Doggie Oats" recipe a bunch of different ways - substituting barley, rice, bulgur, potatoes, or cornmeal. I can use turkey, hamburger, chicken, or even cottage cheese and eggs! There are so many variations!

Two weeks ago I made a weeks' worth of food with the oats and hamburger. Cragar loved it! I cooked the oats while I was browning hamburger, then steamed some carrots and green beans and mixed it all together. The oats made it all look like a gummy mess, but apparently Cragar likes gummy messes, too! Then I made the mini recipe with beef and barley, and one with chicken and brown rice.

I think there's more dog food than people food in my freezer right now.

The regular doggie oats recipe makes a lot of food. I wanted to make sure Cragar was going to be getting nutritional variety (and flavor variety), so I've recently been making the Mini Doggie Oats recipe two different ways. Different meats, grains, and veggies in each. Unfortunately, dietary variety means more time in the kitchen. Usually it was taking 2.5-3 hours from pulling the first pan out of the cabinet to putting the last little freezer bag full of food in the freezer (including all the cleanup). That's quite a chunk of time.

But then I was browsing the Dogster forums and I saw it right there: CROCK. POT.

How could I not have thought of this before? I can cook it all in a crockpot! Throw in the 1 part barley, rice, bulgur, or cornmeal to 2 parts water (or if using oats, use steel cut oats!, then 1 part oats to 3 parts water), raw meat, veggies, cover it up, turn it on, go do something else, come back 8 hours later and voila! What a genius idea. I don't know who thought of it to begin with, but cheers to you!

So the new routine is, add all the food (and appropriate water) to the crockpot and cook it up. After everything cooled down I add the extra bone meal the recipe calls for and the Vitamin E (mixed in with vegetable oil), and mix it all up. I did a little math on the recipe (which calls for Healthy Powder - the stuff that has the powdered ass kelp, lecithin, nutritional yeast, bone meal), and figured out that instead of adding the powder to the whole recipe, I can add just less than a teaspoon to each cup of food I feed him. That way I can add it fresh each time.

With learning all this nutritional stuff, I feel like I'm back in college! Heck, I even created a spreadsheet, based on the Doggie Oats recipe, where I can enter the amount of meat I have (i.e., 2 packages of ground beef totaling 2.25 pounds), and the other ingredients will be calculated automatically, even taking grain substitutions into account!

I'm such a geek.

But I think in the long run, Cragar will benefit immensely from it. He's already got brighter eyes, softer and shinier fur, and more energy than he's had in a long long time.

Now if only some of that would rub off onto me!