Farm-Fresh Friday: Cooking for your Pooch

Farm dogs need love to, and what better way to show your hard-working pups you love him or her than a homebaked treat straight from the oven - or in this case, dehydrator! Now the original recipe I used asked for both pork (which is not ever in this house) and to leave it in the oven overnight, which you can do if you don't have a dehydrator. Why I didn't do that is because I made them in the morning and wanted to use the oven for cooking. However, this is a good time for advice. If you are baking something for dinner ANYWAY, take the time as dinner cooks to slice some tomatoes, arrange some basil leaves or what have you and when dinner is done, turn off the oven and pop them in. You'll save heaps of money (electricity) and time drying food this way and can get a lot in an oven in comparison to my tiny dehydrator, which gets about 6 or 7 full sized tomatoes in the entire thing.

There's a bunch of online recipes for dog biscuits and I'm going to be honest with you - they're crap. My dogs HATED them. They would take them from me and give me this look like.. "You know I love you mother, so I will take this... but the second you leave, I'm burying it in the neighbours yard. Please don't do this again."

Now, this recipe isn't kosher, but neither are my dogs, so here we go:

100g wholewheat flour
100g rolled oats
2 tablespoons wheat germ
2 eggs
75g grated parmesan cheese
100g chopped sausage
100mL water

Combine all ingredients in a bowl until the dough is smooth. Let rest 30 minutes. Preheat oven to 350° or 180°. Grease your baking sheet or line it with parchment.

Roll out the dough until it's fairly thin. I didn't do this and I really should have. They puff up a tad in the oven. Cut into tiny squares. The smaller the better as these go a looong way with the pups. I've been breaking them up myself because I simply made them too large. Place on baking sheet and bake for 25 minutes. Either turn off oven and keep there for 2 more hours or transfer to dehydrator racks and dehydrate for 4 hours.

Store in airtight containter. Voila. Happy workin' dog.