Recipes to Share with Your Dogs

I cook for the dogs just about every day. Some of my favorite recipes to make are ones that can be shared by the humans in the house (since I don’t cook for them quite as often). Here are three shareable recipes from this weekend:

French Toast

My grocery store puts out a rack of breads whose sell-by date is today and marks them down significantly. It’s an opportunity to pick up delicious artisan loaves at great prices. This week I chose a loaf of rosemary potato bread:

I cut the bread into cubes. (Of course you can make the more traditional slices of French toast if you prefer, which I sometimes do. But I always cube the portion I’m feeding to the little dogs anyway so this time I just decided to cube the entire loaf.):

In a mixing bowl, I whisked 15 eggs with a generous splash of vanilla and soaked the cubed bread until the eggs were absorbed. Then I placed about half the mixture at a time into a hot, buttered frying pan and sprinkled heavily with cinnamon (I have no self control when it comes to cinnamon):

After browning the one side, I turned the bread over and browned the other. Then, into the dog bowls:

I added sliced bananas to the bowls before feeding but you could feed as-is or with the toppings of your choice.

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Cinnamon Date Scones

1 egg

1 C buttermilk

2 T honey

2 C whole wheat flour

1 1/2 C all purpose flour

1 C chopped dates

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

lots of cinnamon!

1/2 C melted butter

Whisk the egg in a bowl then mix in buttermilk and honey. Stir in dry ingredients until partially mixed then drizzle in melted butter while stirring to mix thoroughly. Shape the dough into a flat round and cut into six pieces on a greased baking sheet, pulling them slightly apart from one another. Bake at 400 degrees F for 25 minutes:

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Almond Scones

3 C almond meal

2 tsp baking powder

1/4 C coconut oil

1 heaping T honey

1 tsp vanilla

2 eggs

Whisk the eggs in bowl then mix in the remaining wet ingredients. (Note: I had never used coconut oil before making this recipe and found it challenging to get it thoroughly mixed. You could use another nut oil, such as almond or macadamia, if you have it.) Stir in dry ingredients until completely mixed. Shape the dough into a flat round and cut into six pieces on a greased baking sheet, pulling them slightly apart from one another. Bake at 300 degrees F for 20 minutes:

I found these a bit bland for my taste but no complaints from the dogs.

Karen F

Eucritta

These sound delicious, especially the cinnamon date scones – I wonder if the recipe would work with figs? I should bookmark and try it out when our figs come ripe.

Sadly, though, our Bertie doesn’t much care for sweets beyond the occasional bit of fruit. I once gave him a bit of pastry baked with butter, cinnamon and sugar on it – is there a proper name for it? it’s what my grandmother always made with leftover shortcrust – and while he ate it, he did so with a slightly aggrieved look, as if asking why I had to muck up perfectly good crunchy crust with all that *stuff.*

I’m sure figs would work. Mostly how I come up with recipes for the dogs is to modify recipes I find online, substituting ingredients as I see fit. This recipe didn’t call for dates, or cinnamon for that matter, I just like those things and thought they might be good. My thoughts don’t always translate to something I’d be willing to eat but in this case, it turned out all right.
My mom used to put the cinnamon and sugar on the leftover crust and roll it up before baking so the name was easy: cinnamon rolls! They lasted like 30 seconds out the oven.

Eucritta

I asked my father today if he remembered them having a proper name, and he thought my grandmother called them ‘sugar crusts.’ Whenever they lasted long enough to be called much of anything.

I was inspired to share lunch with Bertie today: chunks of stale sourdough toasted a bit with dripping in a skillet, with eggs cracked on top and some grated cheddar. I added onions and hot sauce to mine, but he liked his fine without.

I’ve found he can eat most things I do, which makes sense, given how long dogs have been living with people. What I’ve been most surprised by though is how much he enjoys veggie salads. Give him a wilted salad of cabbage, green beans, black beans and some nuts, and he chows down like the proper little Californian he is.

That’s my view as well – dogs were domesticated and kept for thousands of years on “table scraps”. In the past century, the pet food industry cropped up and tried to convince us this is dangerous and we should buy their products instead – all the while poisoning our pets with melamine, salmonella, aflatoxin and whatever else. I’d rather make use of my leftovers and share food that I eat myself with my dogs.
The one thing my dogs don’t eat is raw greens (lettuce, spinach, etc.). None ever seemed to care for those.

D. Lake

I feed homemade food to all ages and haven’t had any refusals yet. While I consider the French toast with banana to be a meal, I would add some protein (buttermilk, yogurt or ricotta cheese for example) to the scones before feeding or simply use them as treats. And the usual caveats apply about maintaining a wide variety of foods in the diet and not relying on just a few recipes for every day feeding.