Sound the Alert or Cooking is for the Dogs(13)

This AM I was only trying to get my beauty sleep (and don't I need it). Brad had already left for work and I wanted just a few more Z's. I was in deep REM's sleep dreaming about the warm Spring to come, when the Bark Fest began. Beeker started it. His hearing is so good, I swear he can hear the smallest noise on the Moon. Or 20 blocks away. Not to be out done, Max started barking too. He ran to the front door where Beeker had already taken up sentry. Since Max had arrived barking as well, Beeker retreated to the safety of the bedroom. The racket the two of them can make is incredible. Yelling at them to stop barking has no effect, only makes me get a headache. So, I had to get up, go to the door to see what is so exciting (sometimes its deer in our yard, and they are fun to watch). Not this this time. Our garbage truck has come and both dogs want me to know they saw it first. Great! It's just so exciting seeing the garbage truck, it only comes once a week and if I miss it now, I will have to wait a whole week to see it again. Thanks guys!
I crawled back to bed thinking (Okay, don't go there) I could get a few more minutes of valuable shut eye. Nope! My buddy Max likes to come real close to my face, and breath real heavy, a huff actually, to get my attention. He likes to do this when he wants to go outside and I have other ideas(like sleeping). If I ignore him, he is real good at pawing the bed. Okay, that IS annoying. That's when I knew my day had begun. Thanks guys!couldn't have done it without ya!
I decided that I had put off trying to make dog treats long enough, so today was going to be the day. I had received great suggestions and recipes from friends so I figured I was ready. I have also looked online for ideas and today I looked in my refrigerator to see what I had available. I had some cilantro, and thought that maybe that would be a good choice, for variety. Then I wondered if the herb was toxic to dogs. turns out that cilantro isn't toxic. I had also noticed that some recipes call for garlic, but I had always heard that garlic and onions are harmful to dogs. Turns out that yes, onions are really bad for dogs, and while garlic does have a little of the same chemical in it, the percentage is extremely low, therefore it would take a great amount of garlic to harm dogs. I decided to leave it out none the less. I did see a reference that mentioned that dogs can't digest vegetables, so dogs shouldn't be given carrots, but we have always given our dogs carrots and our Vet says they are okay so, I decided to use them.

This is where the fun began. I decided to make two kinds of treats, thinking that this would be comparable to mixing up a batch of cookies. Nooooooo. In one bowl I mixed rice, cheddar cheese, oatmeal, meatballs, beef broth, carrots, and the cilantro. In the other bowl, I put chicken, rice, chicken, mozzarella, chicken broth, carrots, cilantro, some moist wheat bread, peanut butter, and some cilantro. I started with the beef mixture and loaded some of it into my food processor. Tuned it on and , and , nothing. I haven't used it in a while and it would not turn on. It was kaput! I had already put the mixture in and after 5 minute of problem solving I scooped it out and threw the thing away. Now the problem was that I needed someway of mixing the ingredients to a blended dough, and I had carrots in the mixture. Out came my blender. I knew this would be tricky because of the minimal liquid I had in the mix but I needed to grind up the carrots. The chicken mixture worked better than the beef, maybe because of the denseness the of the oatmeal. After blending each batch, I then turned it out into its previous bowl and used my mixer to add flour, lots of flour because by now each mix looked like pate`. They didn't smell bad but both were pasty, not like cookie dough. At this point I had used up all of my bowls and now had all of my cookie sheets greased and ready for action. The trouble was that I couldn't roll out the dough. I guess I could have dropped spoon fulls but I was determined to make rolled treats like I get at the pet store. I have such cute small cookie cutters and thought this was the way to go. Well, plopping the dough down on a floured counter and then adding flour on top, I pressed cute little shapes and then tried to get them onto the cookie sheet. Nope, too sticky. (Have you seen the episode of The Lucy Show, where Lucy is working on an assembly line in a bakery? Yep! that was how I felt) I then figured out to roll the dough directly onto the cookie sheet and the score it into little rectangles. Good enough for the dogs! Then I baked them in the oven. Then baked them some more. They would not get hard and crunchy. The scoring thing worked pretty good and so when I took them out I broke them,pulled them apart and baked them on the other side. Most of the seven cookie sheets did not get crunchy. Maybe I used too much cheese. The dogs liked them. They smelled good. I have enough for a life time of sharing. I'm glad I had this opportunity to make something for my dogs. They only took 6 hours to make too! When I need more dog treats I know right where to get some, I'll be going right to the Pet store and buying them!