Courtesy of Tim’s Mum, I found two great recipes for homemade dog food and homemade dog treats.

Here is the recipe for the dog food.

And here is the recipe for the dog treats.

Since March, I have been feeding Smokey and Cloe homemade dog food using the above recipe.r I find it is a little bit cheaper than canned dog food and they eat it up just the same as canned dog food. I haven’t done the maths but I would estimate we’re saving at least $7 a week by making dog food at home (that’s $364 a year!) and you can make it even cheaper if you buy low grade pet meat mince (an offal mix of leftover bits and pieces from the butcher, usually about $1.50 per kilo) rather than human meat from the meat section of the supermarket (I usually wait until the mince is on special in the meat section – sometimes it’s pork mince, other times its beef or veal – it’s usually around $5 a kilo).

There is just one thing I do differently when I make this recipe, and that is that I add a whole packet of pasta, rather than just one cup of pasta (I usually make it with spirals or tubes). I make a huge batch (sometimes I make a double batch) and then when it’s cooked I let it cool and divide the batch out into freezer bags. Then each morning when I’m making my breakfast, I take a bag of frozen dog food from the freezer, put it on the sink to thaw and dish it out to the dogs in the evening (our dogs get fed once, at night and they are treated throughout the day). One batch of my homemade dog food can last the two dogs 9 or 10 meals each.

If you have a dog (or dogs), I really recommend you make a batch of this dog food and see how it goes down. It’s super easy to make, it’s inexpensive, healthy and the dogs love it. It doesn’t specify in the recipe but I cook mine in a huge stockpot in the oven at 180 degrees (celcius) for about an hour. When I first started with this recipe, I cooked it in the stockpot on the stove top, but that just made the bottom of the pot burn so it’s much better to cook it in the oven, you get an all-round cooking process going.

Here’s what my dog food looks like when it all goes into the pot:

Then when it’s cooked:

And here’s my 10 bags of dog food ready to go in the freezer:

Tim had a go at making the homemade dog treats using the recipe linked above. They turned out really well. He got 96 dog treats from the one batch of dough he made. He even bought a special little cookie cutter to make the treats for the dogs. Here’s how they turned out:

And two special little dog treats:

For two special dogs: