Bark City Doggy Daycare

Fall is quickly coming. Soon it will be time for pumpkin spice lattes, pumpkin bread... pretty much pumpkin anything and everything. Did you know that pumpkin is an amazing food for your dog (or cat)? Pumpkin helps with digestion, urinary health and weight loss (Google it!). BUT, you do not want to give your dog canned pumpkin PIE filling. It has sugar and spices that are not so good for them. Instead, opt for the plain canned stuff or you can easily roast your own pumpkins! This summer, I grew sugar pumpkins for the first time and just found out TODAY that I can roast them in the oven whole! This makes the infamous "cutting and gutting" a lot less time consuming. In fact, I roasted seven little pumpkins, cut them and froze them today.... all on a whim! Here is the process: Beautiful pumpkins. Note how I placed them next to various other fruits in an attempt to show you the approximate size of a sugar pumpkin? Yes, that is a green tomato in the background... It was a cas...

 I found this recipe on Babble and decided to give it a try. I did one alteration: I substituted water for the chicken stock. I make my own chicken stock and was wary of giving it to a dog, because I put quite a bit of onion and garlic in it....and a lot of salt. The substitute did not seem to affect the results.   The Ingredients: 2 1/2 c. whole wheat flour 1/4 c. skim milk powder 1/4 c. Parmesan cheese 1 tsp. baking powder 1 c. water 2 tbsp. olive oil sesame seeds for sprinkles  Next, I gathered my helpers......  .... and we mixed everything together. I like to mix all the dry ingredients before I add the wet ingredients. Once, the mixture starts to stick together and becomes hard to stir, I use my hands to form it into a ball (think play-doh). We let our dough ball sit for ten minutes.... Then, we rolled out long logs and shaped them into pretzels!!! It took a little practice to figure out how thick and long the log should be ...