Homemade dog food

The good news is, I’ve perfected the art of making mushy chicken bones.  Thanks to the advice given by many of you, I’ve cooked about six pounds of chicken thighs in a pressure cooker for two hours, after adding about a third of a cup of vinegar.  The bones practically turn to dust… it’s fabulous.  The dogs love them, and I don’t have to worry about splinters or anything dangerous.  I store the thighs in a plastic container, along with the cooking broth, so I hope the dogs are getting the benefit of some nutrients, despite the rigorous cooking process.  I’m serving the chicken atop a daily serving of Solid Gold Holistique kibble, so it doesn’t quite count as “homemade”, but it is “enhanced”.  That’s what I’m feeding the two big dogs right now and they’re very happy.

Now, for the two little dogs, I really did attempt to make a fully homemade meal using a recipe from the BalanceIt.com site.  The recipe, “Chicken with veggies and rice”, was free, and I bought one bottle of the BalanceIt vitamins.  I asked to have the recipe designed for a 15 lb. dog, meaning it was appropriate to feed both Phoenix and Cricket, and I bought all the ingredients to make one month’s worth of food for both dogs.  I needed about 8 lbs. of chicken breasts, 6 lbs. of frozen peas and carrots, and a bunch of rice.  I wasn’t sure of the dry amounts for the rice, so I just bought a bunch, cooked it in the rice cooker, and then measured out what I needed.  Once I’d done all the calculations (and I did them multiple times to ensure they were accurate), it was very simple to cook the chicken breasts, dice the meat, mix in the veggies, and then mix in the rice.  Voila—I was done, and just needed to add vitamins.  Or so I thought.

I sat back and looked at the food I had just portioned out into daily servings.  The servings were MASSIVE.  The basic recipe, unmodified and “untouched by my lack of math skills” said quite clearly to add 1 and seven-eighths cups of cooked rice to each day’s portion of chicken and veggies.  The chicken and veggies part looked fine, but does a 15 lb. dog really need TWO CUPS of rice every day?  We normally feed our dogs each about 7 ounces of canned food per day, total.  That’s it.  They’re a nice weight, not fat, not skinny, and they’re healthy.  The recipe from BalanceIt was telling me to feed the dogs more than twice that, and the bulk of all the extra food was just rice.  It didn’t make sense to me.  I went over my math again and it was fine, and I compared it to a couple of other recipes and in all of them, huge quanties of carbs were called for.  It really did seem that I’d made the food correctly and had portioned it as directed.

We tried feeding Phoenix and Cricket the homemade food for two days, and even the dogs thought we were trying to kill them with excess (although they did enjoy the food).  It caused a lot of excess poop, most of it visibly full of rice that just passed right through them.  It was getting pretty stupid.  After two days we just put the little dogs back on their regular canned “Eatables”, and gave the rest of the homemade food to the two big dogs.

I’m rethinking a lot after this experiment.  This was only one recipe, but I was not impressed with all the empty calories in it.  I looked at a couple of other recipes, (one for the two big dogs), and it called for so much oatmeal that I’d have to get oatmeal delivered in a dumptruck each week.  A recipe for the cats called for them to each eat the equivalent of half a sweet potato per day, plus meat, and they’d end up turning into little basketballs.  To me, the recipes from BalanceIt are overly-burdened with carbs, and I don’t understand why.  They’ve got one more recipe I may tackle, a “BARF-like” meal made with ingredients like yogurt, fresh veggies, spinach, sweet potato, and chicken (almost two pounds of chicken for one dog), but it’s going to be insanely expensive.  The point of the homemade food project was to improve the dogs’ health, but also to save money, and we’re not off to a good start.  I think the food for the small dogs was pretty economical (I calculated it would cost about $45 per month to feed them both, as compared to $90 buying canned food), but then, the food seemed like junk.

I thought I’d offer this up as my first experience using a recipe from BalanceIt.com.  If you’re cooking for just one pet, and perhaps a very active one, the recipes might be okay.  To me, however, the recipes were laden with carb-fillers, and the portions were way too big.  I’ve seen a number of other homemade recipes online (mostly raw), that appeal to me more than these ones have, so I might be headed in a different direction.

If you have a dog or cat and want a peek at any of the three or four BalanceIt.com recipes I have, please email me and let me know.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 06/03 at 03:13 AM

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  1. Well, that doesn’t seemed to have turned out as planned. After the massive food taint issues, Mom was thinking about making homemade meals for us but not it they are going to be full of empty calories. As it is, Roxie and Sammy get Nutro Ultra Weight Management kibble. Sammy looks good; Roxie needs to move around more. If we get two cups of rice each day, we will have back problems by the end of the week! Thanks for letting us know about your results. We guess it is still kibble and a prayer.

    Roxie, Sammy & Andy

    Posted by Dachsies Rule  on  06/03  at  05:42 AM

  2. I’ve got about half a dozen different recipes from BalanceIt, and one thing I noticed was that the amount of vitamin supplement called for in each recipe is fairly similiar.  After reading the label of the supplement itself (my first bottle arrived last Friday), it seems to just be a pretty standard vitamin/mineral supplement for dogs.  I’m not saying this with any authority or educational expertise, but my guess is that as long as you feed your dog a good variety of foods, the BalanceIt powder is really just a broad-spectrum supplement to fill in any nutritional gaps.  I have read suggestions that folks who cook for their dogs should toss in the occasional childrens’ vitamin, and my interpretation is that BalanceIt is a powdered dog multivitamin.  There’s obviously more nuance to it than that, but I’m going to modify some of the recipes proportionally, while still adding the supplement.  For example, the dogs really loved the chicken/peas/carrots/rice mix, so I’m going to try making them chicken/peas/carrots, plus a small portion of potatoes.  Then I’ll add the BalanceIt.

    I know that somewhere, a nutritionist is cringing at what I wrote.  However, most people go through life without taking vitamins, and most people who cook for their pets don’t depend on a supplement for nutritional balance.  An alert owner can easily see if a pet is thriving on a diet, just by looking at the pet’s hair, body language, stools, etc., so I’m going to try cooking with common sense for the next month to see how it goes.

    Posted by Leigh-Ann  on  06/05  at  01:21 AM
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