u/Barneskat

Hi everyone. This month I've started making homemade dog food after working with our vet. We adopted a bonded pair in February. One is an English Lab and the other is a Doxle. They weigh 90 pounds together and for the month of April, we spent a little over $253.00 on food just for the dogs feeding them Purina One Chicken and Rice kibble plus wet food. We went with Purina because that was what the shelter was feeding them. Hubby and I talked it over on how to lower the dogs food bill because those numbers didn't sit right with us. So I found a place where I can reliably get bone-in, skin on chicken thighs for 1.79/pound, Brown rice for .79/pound, and eggs were on sale for .99/dozen. I got a 64 oz bag of frozen mixed vegetables on sale for $2.50. The zero waste comes in because in addition to the protein for the dogs, my husband takes containers of chicken for himself for his work, I put the bones and the skin into my biggest stock pots and fill them with water and let them go for about 48 hours. I clean and dehydrate the eggshells and then grind them repeatedly until they're the consistency of baby powder or pressed eyeshadow. The bones after cooking that long are also crushed, dehydrated, and ground into powder. If there's any chicken skin left, it gets dried and then deep fried and salted for snacks for us. The stock gets cooled and then defatted. We keep the fat to use as cooking fat, and then the beautiful jiggly stock gets pressure canned. The chicken bits left in the bottom of the stock either get strained out, mixed with rice and whatever leftover vegetables that are in the fridge, whizzed together into a paste and then rolled out into layers and dehydrated until crisp and used as crunchies for the dogs as treats. If I don't do that then the bits get dehydrated, ground up and mixed with seasonings to make bouillon. Before the dogs, the eggshells went into the compost as did the leftover vegetables (well after they were used for veggie stock) but I've noticed that we're not adding nearly as much kitchen scraps to the compost as we used to. So we've cut about 40 dollars off the dog food price and we've gotten several free gifts with purchase in the form of stock, bouillon powder, calcium and phosphorus supplements (the powdered eggshells and bone meal), and snacks. As for the time, it really wasn't too labor intensive by my standards maybe 3 hours of hands on time across a weekend but I admit to wondering how the energy costs will shake out. Now if I could just figure out how to make healthy cat food that they would eat, lol.