DogDinners I make my dog food fresh in the kitchen every evening. This means when I go out of town, there is no dog chef! 🙂 Here is what I do, either for when my husband has to feed the dogs while I’m out of town, or when someone is house-sitting for us when we both leave.

At the same time as making one dinner, I pre-make a whole assembly line of them. Including a set for the day I get back, so I don’t have to scramble on that day. I use those inexpensive disposable save-it containers, and I stick a post-it note on the top of each one with the appropriate dog’s initial. All the dogs get supplements (C, yeast, lecithin, kelp, alfalfa, oil, AC vinegar), and some of the dogs get unique supplements (glucosamine, grape seed extract, arthritis pain meds, digestive enzymes), and each one eats a different portion size. So thus their containers are all individualized and have to be labeled.  I stack them in the fridge; and then all someone has to do is dump out the contents into their stainless bowls.

I make life easy for myself sometimes when I do this by buying some some pre-made ingredients, which I wouldn’t use on normal days. In this case, it was a huge bag of generic brand Cheerios in place of the whole grain I’d normally cook. I didn’t have time to cook it before I left. There are steamed vegetables in the bottom of these, a fresh egg, and their normal raw meat rotation- ground turkey for most days, and liver, beef hamburger, and canned fish each one day a week. Their sitter would also feed them each a raw chicken leg in the mornings.

Thus far, I’m still feeding the LGDs some commercial kibble, just because they eat so dang much, it’s hard for me to cook that much volume in the kitchen (I’m kind of slowly working up to it). So, when I’m gone, those two dogs are reverted to all kibble, poor things, for convenience. I figure it’s too much to ask for someone to carry their goopy dinners down to the field every day like I do, and that would be a lot of big bowls in the fridge. But I don’t leave very often, so this is a minor thing- most days, they get chef food. 🙂

When we go camping with dogs, I just bring along the ingredients and make their dinners the normal way in our trailer. Only I might leave out some things, like all but their key supplements, for simplicity. On the rare occasions I might travel for a week or more with dogs, I’d stop at a grocery store midweek to pick up some basics, like cereal, raw meat, and canned veggies, to tide them over. They are really flexible eaters, their taste buds reject almost nothing, so planning for travel is pretty easy!

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