Max is our 15-year-old Chihuahua. We want him to live long and healthy, so a few years ago, we started feeding him “Fresh Pet” dogfood, which is sold in a refrigerator case at the grocery store. It’s kind of expensive.
My husband is a chef, and one day, he decided to try and recreate the recipe. It worked great! Now, we create a big batch every 6 weeks or so and freeze it in sandwich-size baggies. It saves money and guarantees that Max is getting the best food possible.
I thought it might be nice to share this, just in case you’d like to do this for your dog, too. Here’s how:
- In a small pot, cook 2 cups of rice. I’m using organic “Field Day” basmati.
- In a large pot, brown 3 pounds of ground turkey. Add a sprinkling of turmeric and a tiny dash of salt. You could also use ground chicken, beef, lamb, pork… or mix them. Don’t drain the fat.
- Cut 3 or 4 carrots into small bites OR drain and add 1 can of cooked carrots.
- Add a can of pumpkin (stock up in the fall) OR 3 to 4 peeled, diced sweet potatoes.
- Add a can of green peas.
- Add diced butternut squash.
- Chop broccoli into tiny bites and add that, too. (Unless your dog is much larger than Max and has all his teeth!)
Simmer all of these together until the carrots are soft.
Add rice until it looks like a good mix. I ended up adding about 3/4ths of the rice I had cooked to this amount.
After I combined all the elements, we were concerned that the carrots were still too hard, so I added 3 cups of water and let it simmer for a while, maybe an hour.
After most of the water evaporated out, we move the dogfood to baking trays so that it can cool.
Once cooled, we bag it and seal up the bags, stacking them like bricks in the freezer.
Max loves helping with the clean up. 🩷🐕
The bags are easy to thaw … just pull one out and set it in the sink for a couple of hours. I usually put a little warm water over it when I feed him so that it warms up and makes a little “gravy.”
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