Morning At The Stove

It seems that I spend my life either taking things out of the freezer (fall and winter) or putting things into the freezer (spring and summer). The putting-into-the-freezer season is here, and I'd better get busy, if we want to eat next winter.

I harvested a big armful of rhubarb this morning.  I love those huge leaves, as big as elephant ears, and stack them on some wild rosebush sprouts that I'm trying to suffocate to death (it's almost impossible to kill a wild rosebush without using herbicides).  I chopped up the rhubarb stems and filled three one-gallon bags, each of which--with the addition of eggs, flour, oil and pecans--will make  a batch of six rhubarb bread loaves on some snowy afternoon.  When the chopping was done I was left with the trademark black fingernails that result from some weird reaction between the rhubarb juice and my skin and will take about a week to disappear.

I also picked a basketful of kale, which I tore into pieces and threw, stems and all, into the big vat of dog food that I cook every month.  In case you're wondering, this mixture of rice, veggies, eggs, oil, garlic and powdered milk does not constitute my dogs' entire diet--only about a quarter of it, the rest being a decent kind of kibble.  Wolfie and Bisou love it, though, and I feel that I'm ensuring that they will live forever....

The lavender has just started blooming, so I picked that, hoping to encourage the plants to produce more.  It's not been a good lavender year so far--lavender wants hot, dry weather instead of this chilly damp. I lost a couple of plants over the winter, and the survivors are putting out feeble little blooms.  I hung today's harvest in a bunch from the light fixture above the dining room table.  It doesn't look like much, but I can smell it every time I walk by.

I've been meaning to make arugula soup while the arugula, which does like chilly damp weather, holds out.  Also, my spinach crop has been negligible, but I should do something with it before the weather changes and it bolts.  Meanwhile, it's started raining again.  My green Vermont is so green these days that when I look out the window I almost feel like I'm swimming underwater in some woodland pond.

A Dog's Breakfast

I made cheese a couple of days ago, and saved the garlic- and rosemary-flavored whey. Then I froze a few quarts of broccoli, and saved the greenish blanching water. I dumped the whey and the green water into my five-gallon pot and added a bunch of roughly cut, unpeeled carrots. I turned the burner on high, grabbed a basket and went into the garden.

The zucchini did not disappoint. Poking out from under the raspy leaves were three that had grown thicker than my arm. The kale, looking like broccoli with a permanent, was at its peak. In the kitchen, I emptied the basket into a sinkful of water, scrubbing off only slugs and other major offenders. I cut the zucchini into egg-sized pieces, tore the kale with my bare hands, opened four cans of mackerel, and dumped it all into the pot.

I was working fast, trying to produce a maximum of food in a minimum of time. But I wasn't stressed, the way I get when I have to fix supper in a hurry. I knew what I was making would be well received.

When the pot came to a boil, I threw in some rice. Twenty minutes later, I had seventeen quarts of a smelly, heterogeneous gunk that, combined with some kibble and a raw chicken leg, will be the highlight of Wolfie's and Lexi's days for the month to come.

“A disorderly mixture, a hodgepodge,” is how the dictionary defines a dog's breakfast.
But if my dogs had to write a description for a restaurant menu, it would read like this: “A textured melange of fresh, organic garden vegetables and herbs highlighted with the aroma of wild-caught seafood and enlivened with undertones of pastured goat's whey on a base of sushi-style rice.”

November 24, 2008, "Dog Food Confessions"

Those of you who read my October 25 and October 30 posts know that I've been cooking my dogs' food for almost a month. And I've come to the conclusion that it's insane to keep doing it. Here's why:

1. Our freezer isn't big enough to store food for both dogs for even a single week, and ideally, to save time and labor, I'd like to fix two weeks' worth of food at a time.

2. To get around the freezer space problem, I decided to cook the meat and vegetables part of the meals separately from the rice. That way I could freeze the meat and veg, and cook the rice as needed. But that meant cooking rice every day and a half or so, and meat and veg every week, and remembering to defrost the next day's meat every morning, and keeping track of how the rice was holding up for each meal. Plus, since the dogs are different sizes, I had to remember how much rice and how much meat and veg each needed to eat at every meal. Should we ever go on a trip, I realized, I could never explain all this to the dog-sitter.

3. Ever since I started cooking for them, the dogs have been ravenously, constantly hungry. I've re-checked their protein intake and increased their rations to no effect. Two hours after a meal, they're famished, like me after dinner in a Chinese restaurant. And watching them patrol the kitchen for the smallest crumb, or inhale the seed hulls at the bottom of the bird feeder, or hearing them whine piteously when I start preparing their food has an unwholesome effect on my nerves. It makes me feel worried, unsettled and dispirited..

But I'm not going wholly back to kibble. I'll be supplementing it with vegetables, eggs, meat, powdered milk, canned fish—whatever comes to hand and seems healthy.

I'll be happier, and so will Lexi and Wolfie, for dog does not live by bread alone, but also by the feeling of easy communion with a non-frazzled mistress.

O.k., that's it. I'm throwing in the towel, crying uncle, waving the white flag, giving up, capitulating. I'm not cooking dog food anymore.

November 1, 2008 "Feeeeed Meeeeeee!"

I can “hear” Wolfie and Lexi saying it all day long. But I'm starting to grow inured to their pleas. I'm feeding them four and a half pounds of food every day, for crying out loud. How can they still be hungry?

This afternoon I took them out, one at a time, to work and exercise them, but first I let them watch me fill the treat pouch with pieces of mozzarella and tie it around my waist. Wolfie did some nice stays and recalls and was delighted with the cheese rewards. Then I brought out the ball thrower, which he is addicted to, and made him stay while I waved the thrower around. He was o.k. with that. I ratcheted up the challenge by actually throwing the ball past him, and he held his stay. But when I tried to reward his self control with a bit of cheese, all he cared about was the BALL! He wanted to CHASE THE BALL!!! That's why he'd done all that silly stuff I'd asked of him, so he COULD CHASE THE BALL!!!! It was clear that even the ripest Camembert would not have distracted him, so I put the cheese away and let him have a rip-roaring session of chasing THE BALL!!

(As I threw balls for him with all my might, I remembered, two years ago, with the snow deep outside, locking myself in our guest room with eight-week-old Wolfie and a little ball. I would throw the ball and he would toddle after it, but would get distracted by the fringe on the rug. Eventually he'd remember the ball, start to bring it to me, drop it, go after the fringe again, find the ball, chew on it a while...tempus fugit.)

Then it was Lexi's turn to work. This is a dog who's been through years of obedience training, and has all her commands down pat. But she was so focused on cheese, the presence of cheese, the possibility of cheese, that when I put her on sit/stay and walked away in order to do a recall, she kept getting up and following me. It was as if there were a string from her nose to the cheese, and she couldn't not follow it. It took a few tries, but eventually she recalled what recalls were all about, and ran to me to snatch her reward, almost taking off my fingers as she did so.

The dogs have just had their dinner, and are lying down, momentarily sated. In half an hour, though, they'll be thinking about food again, like this:

Wolfie and Lexi 30 minutes after a meal

October 30, 2008 "Insatiable, Voracious..."

That's what my dogs are. Ever since I fed them their first home-cooked dinner, Wolfie and Lexi have had nothing but food on their minds. With two intense German Shepherds following my every move day and night, I'm starting to feel like my Cro-Magnon ancestors when they heard the howling come closer, and saw pairs of glowing eyes staring at them just beyond the firelight.

I don't know how to interpret this new food fixation. Does it mean they adore my cooking (and it does smell good, if I say so myself), or are they truly hungry? Lexi's veterinary chiropractor/acupuncturist (one of Lexi's favorite people in the whole world; see doctorstephanie.com) did warn me that feeding a home-cooked diet would require a larger volume of food than feeding commercial kibble. But I wasn't prepared for how much larger.

In the good-old kibble days, Lexi would get two cups and Wolfie four cups of kibble every day, for a total of six cups. Bearing in mind Dr. Stephanie's advice, I increased the amount to eight cups a day for both dogs. I made up my first big vat of rice and chicken livers and sardines and kale and apportioned it neatly into seven freezer bags, each containing eight cups.

I laugh a bitter laugh at my naivete. Those bags are leaving the freezer at a much faster rate than one a day. For the moment, feeding TEN cups a day is barely sufficient to keep my toes from being chewed off. I've been told to watch my dogs' weight to judge how much to feed them. That's easier said than done. Day-to-day, my dogs look pretty much the same to me. That is how last winter Lexi somehow put on ten pounds, which we've been struggling ever since to get off her.

As I write, there's another, bigger vat of dog food cooking on the stove. I'm going out of town next week, and my husband is not into canine—or any kind—of cooking (I'll freeze some bags of human food for him as well). I'm also leaving some emergency kibble in the pantry (for the dogs).

But I'm into this cooking-of-dog-food for the long run, I hope, and I have to find a way to do it efficiently. Over the decades, I have mastered the art of producing a decent, nourishing dinner (though not one that would earn Michelin stars) for my husband and me in thirty minutes max (twenty is preferable). With that in mind, how big a deal should I make of my dogs' meals?

Is life too short to cook for dogs? Would the cooking time be better spent playing with Lexi and Wolfie? Keeping up with friends? Cooking for my husband? Doing yoga? Life on earth is a zero-sum game. What matters most?

What do you think?