Cooking for Pleasure: Just for the dogs

Dog biscuits ready to bake. (Photo by Patty Schied)

By Patty Schied

It recently occurred to me that I have completely neglected Juneau’s beloved dogs when writing this column. I no longer have one, but I love greeting the dogs I see each morning when I walk the Mendenhall Wetlands Airport Dike Trail. I thought it was about time to come up with a recipe for dog biscuits with ingredients that they love and share them. 

Out of curiosity, I checked the price of dog biscuits at a local supermarket. Much to my shock, I saw a package of ‘gourmet’ ones cost about one dollar per ounce. Not sure what was in them to make them so expensive. I knew I could do better.

There are quite a variety of dog biscuit recipes that can be found on the internet, some of them even requiring icing. Can you really imagine your dog checking out a homemade dog biscuit and critiquing the shape? Or turning one down because the icing was ineptly applied?

Remembering what my dogs liked to eat, I decided to make a dough that was a mixture of peanut butter, eggs and ground cooked chicken livers along with various grains. If your dog is allergic to any of these, feel free to make substitutes. These are very easy to make. I think I got about six dozen biscuits for about 25 cents an ounce.

Ingredients:

½ pound of raw chicken livers (The chicken liver containers at Fred Meyer’s held a pound.  I cooked them all and fed the ones I didn’t need to my sister’s dog.)

1/3 cup peanut butter

2 eggs

1 cup oats, pulverized in a food processor or blender

1 cup cornmeal

1 cup whole wheat flour

Rolling the dough. (Photo by Patty Schied)

Directions:

Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Cover two large cookie sheets with parchment paper.

Place chicken livers in a small saucepan and cover with water. Bring to a boil and let simmer for about 10 minutes. Cool. Drain cooked chicken livers but set aside about a cup of the water they were cooked in.

Puree chicken livers, peanut butter and eggs in a food processer (if you don’t have one, just mash them together with a fork). Add oats, cornmeal and whole wheat flour and blend to form a malleable dough. If it seems stiff, add some of the chicken liver water.

Roll out dough to about ¼ inch thick. Cut into desired shapes (I used a small dog biscuit cutter, but I have found that dogs don’t seem to have an aesthetic preference).

Place biscuits on cookie sheets fairly close together (they don’t spread) and bake for about an hour. The long baking makes them hard. They store very well at room temperature but don’t last long once your dog sees where you put them.

Patty Schied feeds dogs on the airport trail her homemade biscuits. (Photo courtesy of Patty Schied)

I took a bag of these biscuits to the airport trail for a doggy taste test. The response was enthusiastic to the point several dogs followed me down the trail, abandoning their owners and leaving dog prints on my jacket and pants.

• Patty Schied is a longtime Juneau resident who studied at the Cordon Bleu in London and has written a cookbook. Cooking For Pleasure appears every other week in the Juneau Independent's features. She welcomes questions about her column at patschied@yahoo.com.