Minty Dog Treats

Are you looking for a quick and easy dog treat recipe? Or are you trying to combat stinky breath? We've got you covered with these Minty Dog Treats. One of the lovely ladies form my Rebel Canners FB group shared this recipe, and I whipped up a batch today for our pup. She had to check them out at first, but quickly grew to love them. Now she keeps trying to get into the container!

Minty Dog Treats
½ c mint leaves, chopped
¼ c applesauce
½ c parsley, chopped
¼ c shredded carrot (optional)
3-4 c flour
2 eggs
water

Combine everything together, using enough water to make a non-sticky dough
Roll ¼ inch thick and cut into desired shape
Bake 10-15 min at 350F

Elisha notes that you can easily swap the apple sauce for pumpkin puree or mashed bananas. Her flour of choice is whole wheat, and I have heard good things about oat flour as well, but really you can use whatever flour you want.

When I made these, I used dried herbs. I have what I believe to be 2 crazy mint plants in my front yard, but I haven't verified which type, and no fresh parsley. It's a super easy swap, just make sure to only use a third of the specified amount if swapping in dried for fresh herbs (so in this case, only use 2 Tbsp + 2 tsp of each herb).

I've also hear both mint and parsley are good for bad breath. If you don't have one you could very likely leave the other out, or possibly double whichever you have on hand.

Let me know how you and your dog like these treats! And if you have other pet treat recipes that you love, please share them :)

Pickles & Pizza

This will be a week of cooking, baking, and experimenting with food it seems...

This weekend I decided to make pickles. I had trouble finding appropriate cucumbers so I went with English (ended up using 1.5 per recipe). I also cut down the water in the dill recipe to 2 c and added 2 c to the bread and butter recipe to get each recipe to fit nicely in 1 qt jars (this also resulted in just 1/2 an onion in the bread and butter recipe).

Dill Pickles
I made these for my brother as they are the only kind of pickles he likes. They were a success but he did say they have their own flavor (he was comparing them to my buddy's mom's recipe...I may have to ask her what she did n_~)

Bread and Butter Pickles

These were good but missing something...perhaps not enough sugar (I did 1/2 c not 3/4 c). Another possibility is the wrong vinegar and sugar as I've seen other recipes using apple cider vinegar and brown sugar or a combo of those with white and white. The only spice I might be missing is cloves it seems. I'll just have to tweak things next time around I think

Saturday evening after preparing the pickles, I went to Angelo Caputo's in search of delicious Italian meats and walked out with a half pound of prosciutto and a half pound of hot sopressata. They were delicious and the boyfriend and I ate them with buttered croissants, but now we have a ton of leftover meat. The obvious solution was to make a white pizza.

We were going to make our own thin crust, but when we got to my buddy's house we discovered he didn't even have flour let alone the other ingredients. So instead we settled for Trader Joe's pizza dough. We also picked up Trader Joe's garlic olive oil. The pizza turned out very well and we still have left over meat and cheese so there may be a repeat later this week.

Tonight I will be making sun pork and later this week I will make my kebabs and grilled asparagus again (they are pretty basic; I just let the meat marinade in this spice rub for 24 hours then coat the kebabs with Open Pit before grilling, the asparagus just gets a slather of olive oil and fresh minced garlic with a dash of salt).

My mom and I also found some new recipes to try: zucchini chips (a FB recipe, although my last two FB recipes made a delicious dinner), parmesan kale chips, zucchini muffins, and cucumber salsa.