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:
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.
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.
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.
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