Just made a big batch of homemade dog food (loads of pics)

[KFC]

Okay, firstly apologies for the bad pics - my tablets were eaten by a dog (no, really) and my phone doesn't have a camera so I had to take these with my laptop webcam.

I'm a crap photographer and not particularly good at cooking.... if I can do this hopefully it'll inspire others to have a go. I'm going to list prices etc so you can see how little it actually costs.

Here is the ingredients:



Turkey livers - 2 packs, 1.1kg = 1.58 euros
1kg tricolour pasta - 2 euros. Half pack used = 1 euro
6kg of chicken (2 full chickens = 2.93 euros - edit- obviously wrote this one down wrong, can't be 50 cents a kg! The price is definitely right, the wait isn't. '2 regular chickens' is all i can list this as now, sorry
Calf liver - 0.6kg = 2.93 euros
1kg frozen mixed veg - 1 euro. Half pack used = 50 cents
12 eggs (forgot to put those in the pic) = 1.85 euros
pigs heart - 0.4kg = 86 cents

---

11.65 euros and this could have been done cheaper - I'll explain later. Ignore the fish in the pic, they weren't used or accounted for in the price list above

Everything was easy to cook - eggs, livers, veg all boiled. Chickens and heart done in the oven. To save space on the cooker and hopefully make it more tasty I done the pasta in the same pans as the liver, cooking it for 20 minutes. The heart took about an hour, the chickens 90 minutes. But its all simple cooking - just chucking stuff in and leaving it.

Liver & pasta cooking:



Cooked and draining:



Eggs boiled and back in pack to cool down:



Eggs & veg ready to go:



Heart ready to chop:



Chickens cooked:



All meat removed from chickens:



Other things ready to mix:



Everything bagged into individual portions:




Some points on the cost - I removed the breasts from one of the chickens so there could have been more food. I kept that one back myself so one of my own meals is partially paid for in the numbers above

It seems awfully wasteful to use full chickens, then cook them - you are creating a couple of carcasses that the dogs can't eat (no cooked bones for them). Whereas if you'd fed them the chicken raw they could have consumed it all. Perhaps less waste if you use the leftovers to make a soup?

All in I ended up with 17 meal sizes (slightly larger than normal jack russell type dog). They begged constantly through the cooking process... if they had been in the garden I could easily have ended up with 20 portions here.

My portuguese is bad and I wasn't quite sure what I was ordering - calf liver at 4.69 euros a kg is relatively expensive if you're cooking for pets. Other animal livers are < 2 euros a kg.

Pasta could be bought a lot cheaper too - one of my dogs is funny with it though and I know she'll eat the brand that I do... so I went with a more expensive one there.

Also included in the price was a couple of bags of all the extra chicken bits (feet, stomach, necks etc) - so I've got a bunch of handy training treats too out of the price above.

I could/should have spent 10 euros, and got 20 meals from it. Compare this to the price of garbage foil trays/cans of pedigree chum etc... imho you're paying more for a significantly worse product. If you can spare the time this is really the way to go - I'll give them one of these a day then a high quality granule in a bowl that they can eat from if/when they want.

You could of course do all of the above completely raw and bag it up and freeze it... but I struggle to get one of them to eat raw livers & organs... so doing it this way is easier to mix it up for me. They'll get raw fish a couple of times a week, and raw meat with bones a couple of times a week too, on top of the cooked stuff above.

If anyone does make any, feel free to post your recipe or a pic

Some things I learned -

• bigger pots and pans would have made this SIGNIFICANTLY easier
• I could have cooked 2 or 3 times the quantity with no extra effort (assuming I fixed point 1 above)
• if you cook eggs in a pan with livers, they'll come out looking like they've been up a hens arse
• doing this on a tuesday afternoon when your cleaner does her weekly visit 10am-midday tuesday, is idiotic
• if you intend to swipe chicken breasts for yourself - bear in mind cooking it with no seasoning and covered all the way through will lead to it being awfully bland. Plan ahead (use for a curry?) Or perhaps remove the breasts before cooking and then do them however you like.
• next to no meat comes off chicken wings - you might as well remove those and do them yourself, or give them to the dogs raw.

Edited by KFC on Tuesday 4th February 18:16

Edited by KFC on Tuesday 4th February 18:19

Edited by KFC on Tuesday 4th February 18:19

Edited by KFC on Tuesday 4th February 23:07

[otolith]

Just on the chicken carcasses - we use the carcass from roasting a chicken to make stock. I put the wing and leg bones and what is left after carving in the slow cooker with some veg and leave it overnight and often half the next day if I forget to turn it off. After this treatment, I can crush the bones between my fingers. I'm happy giving that to the dog (but he is a fairly large and wolfy beast, maybe I'd be less confident about giving it to a toy breed).

[KFC]

The main danger is bones splintering after cooking - if they were that soft they were falling apart I can't see it causing any problems. I just chucked the carcasses over the fence... the stray cats will eat them.

Also one thing I meant to put - the pasta and turkey livers was bloody tasty - I could easily have eaten a bowl of that myself. In fact I'd probably have had an extra meal portion if I wasn't picking at those while I was cooking Next time I'm going to do a bit extra of those and have that for my lunch. I think I'll pass on the heart and calf liver though - they seemed a bit tough compared to the turkey.

[otolith]

If I had some calf's liver in the house, the dog could go and whistle for it!

[Mobile Chicane]

That all looks fresh and delicious. Lucky dogs!

[digger the goat]

Sod the hounds !!!!

Can I come for dinner please ???


( p.s.... How long have you been living in a mirror ?? )

[KFC]

otolith said:

If I had some calf's liver in the house, the dog could go and whistle for it!

I might need to give it a try cooking it for myself - but it definitely tasted tougher than the turkey livers. I just boiled them all though with no real thought to what I was doing. Perhaps I'll try the pan fried turkey livers before getting a bit more adventurous and moving up in animal size

digger the goat said:

Sod the hounds !!!!

Can I come for dinner please ???


( p.s.... How long have you been living in a mirror ?? )

Lol, webcam reverses everything!

Mobile Chicane said:

That all looks fresh and delicious. Lucky dogs!

It passed the taste test this morning... so tasty/cheap/easy - this needs to go down as a huge success I think. I'm going to buy a couple of bigger pans and do a larger batch on the next run. I'll probably have a look for other cheap/easy ingredients to throw into the mix too, and dump the calf livers.

I might dump the full chickens also for something else - I don't have a slow cooker so I can't use them for stock, and don't particularly like soup so making that is of no real interest. Maybe cheap stewing beef would have worked out cheaper when you factor in zero waste from that.

[otolith]

KFC said:

otolith said:

If I had some calf's liver in the house, the dog could go and whistle for it!

I might need to give it a try cooking it for myself - but it definitely tasted tougher than the turkey livers. I just boiled them all though with no real thought to what I was doing.

Yes, if you want to eat it, slice it thin, dust with seasoned flour, fry in butter and serve it pink.

[Sexual Chocolate]

The spaniel refuses kidneys and livers but we had success with chicken gizzards. I have no idea what they are but we can buy them from the halal butcher fairly cheaply. Might be worth giving these a go instead of livers if the dog doesn't eat them.

Well done you for making your own food! Happy dog I bet.

[KFC]

Sexual Chocolate said:

The spaniel refuses kidneys and livers but we had success with chicken gizzards. I have no idea what they are but we can buy them from the halal butcher fairly cheaply. Might be worth giving these a go instead of livers if the dog doesn't eat them.

Well done you for making your own food! Happy dog I bet.

I think Gizzards is just a fancy name for Stomachs - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gizzard They do them in the supermarket also, I think they're like 2 euros/kg - same price as livers and so on.

I need to go find a 'proper' butcher, and take a portuguese speaker with me and see what they can do. I'll do that on the next batch with my bigger pots, I will report back with an update

[otolith]

The gizzard is a muscular pouch which some birds use to grind their food up with grit.