- Raw Dog Food Recipe

Dear Fans of Hounds Who Cook,

It is a dog day today (that is a good thing). We have been testing and tasting Me's abundant recipe of our new diet and I, Elias, am in heaven. I have licked bowl upon bowl, I have slurped up overflow from the floor, I have eaten fresh chicken with the bone in. If I were to die tonight, I would die a most satisfied dog with only good to say about my Person.

Me has been driven to this raw diet extreme due to the Gute's incessant and nonstop itching. He has scratched his belly bare again. In the past she felt the apple cider vinegar in his diet was keeping the itching to a minimum, but for some reason that's not working anymore. It was especially bad after we came back from the elder's woods and Guthrie was red all over his underside.

Me has decided to come with both barrels at the allergens that afflict my slender brother and this is a victory for dogs everywhere for we are going raw like our forefathers and our cousins the mighty wolf. We are not going to be allowed to catch it (drat!) but it's the next best thing to freshly killt.

Here is her favorite recipe from all of her online searching, which took the whole entire day. So far we love it mightily.

Raw Dog Food
The pup dog's morning meal will be a vegetable-meat mix and the evening meal is meaty bone such as chicken necks and the like. This recipe is based on foodstuffs for 50 pounders, such as we. Just adjust the size of the portions you freeze if you are a heftier (or lightweight) dog.

1. Veggie Meat Mix
1 lb. beef, pork, bison, turkey, chicken, or what have you (only one type per recipe)
2 cups ground vegetables including roots and above-ground growers (NO onions or mushrooms)
2-4 oz. chicken gizzard, heart, liver ground OR liver and heart of the base meat for the mix
1/2 cup raw apple cider vinegar
2-3 garlic cloves
1 tablespoon kelp powder
1/2 cup yogurt
3 eggs and shells
parsley

Grind meat and organs. Grind vegetables, garlic, and whole eggs in a blender with apple cider vinegar (measure vegetables after grinding, not before, so make it a generous 2 cups). Stir into ground meat with kelp, yogurt and parsley (for breath).

Use a canning funnel to scoop 5 oz of vegetable meaty goodness into muffin tins oiled with extra virgin olive oil. Freeze in the muffin tin. Each 5-ouncer is breakfast for one 50 pound dog. We made a triple recipe (because we had already ground that much meat) and it made 26 servings - two weeks of eating for us two pups.

Serve a breakfast muffin with two nice fish oil capsules and one vitamin E capsule for good measure.

2. Din Din
For supper, give your pup chicken or turkey necks, backs, wings or carcasses - only RAW or the bones will be the end of him. For slacker indoor dogs like us, the breakfast muffin should be 20-40 percent of the day's food (we go with 30%) and the meaty bone dinner should be 60-80% (we go with 70%) - you can vary it based on what you have available. So, for us, we need about 11 ounces of meaty bone. Sometimes it's a beef bone with a huge surround of meat on it, but routinely it's necks of birds because the bones are small and fun to chew and nutritious. And, our girl Me can get unlimited chicken necks for 59 cents a pound from the grocery store butcher. That makes our meal cheaper than the nice quality dog kibble she had been feeding us.

Tonight we had wings.

Once a week she promises us we can have fish - with heads and bones and everything. That is going to be a real joy. She is thinking she should put the elderman to work to provide that part of the meal for us.

Notes from Elias: To figure out your pup's proportions - feed him 2% of his body weight each day. Since we are 50 pounds, 2% is 1 pound - so we get 5 oz of vegetable-meat mix in the morning and 11 oz of chicken necks at night.

Notes from Guthrie: As much as Eli doesn't like it, one day a week on this diet a pup should fast. I feel it cleans out my insides nicely and I like have a shapely hound physique. Eli is more into bulking up. Speaking of cleaning out insides, because this is food with good enzymes and natural moisture, it's not going to swell up in our bellies before we can digest it like kibble does - so we will digest it in about four hours instead of 12. We like that efficiency.

People online who have done this diet rave about the good health and fur of their pups and the absence of allergies. We'll let you know how we fare on it. I, the Gute, am hoping to be less itchy, that's all.