I Guess I'll Have to Eat Like a Dog

Mikey's teaching me how to eat.

When I began my research for People Food for Pets, I found many lists of doggie “no no’s.” I consulted list after list; the foods on the lists began sounding familiar.

I’ve been suffering from migraine headaches for as long as I can remember and have been researching the food triggers. Most, but not all, of the migraine “no no’s” have been problems for me. No one has demonstrated whether the foods have a cumulative effect; that could explain the seemingly random headaches, but I know I’ve been the target of each one at some time.

Yes, migraine headaches are the enemy. The enemy seems to sneak into my bedroom at three in the morning and shoot me in the head, usually only on one side, leaving me incapacitated. Then we begin our dialogue: “What did you eat yesterday? Did you eat lunch, breakfast? What time did you come into bed last night? Yadda yadda yadda”

Here’s a curious list:

Bad for Dogs	Bad for Migraines
aged cheese	aged cheese
alcohol	alcohol
bananas	bananas
beer	beer
caffeine	caffeine
chickpeas	chickpeas
chocolate	chocolate
citrus	citrus
corncobs	corncobs
eggplant	eggplant
garlic	garlic
ketchup	ketchup
mushrooms	mushrooms
mustard seeds	mustard
onions	onions
processed meats	processed meats
raisins	raisins
raspberries	raspberries
red grapes	red grapes
red plums	red plums
soy sauce	soy sauce
tea	tea
tomatoes	tomatoes
uncooked yeast dough	uncooked yeast dough
walnuts	walnuts
wine	wine

All these migraine triggers have been on my list for years. Yes, I do give in and eat pizza or sausages with peppers and onions, but at three AM I regret it.

I’m working on a cookbook with recipes for pet food made from the same ingredients that I use for my people food. The first thing I had to find was a list of foods that were dangerous for dogs, ingredients I could never use in my dog food.

If I couldn’t use the ingredients in the dog food, I certainly couldn’t include them in my people food recipes. We’ve been eating the people food without the problematic ingredients for two weeks, and I haven’t had a single headache, not one. Could I have conquered the enemy?

Now I have to figure out how to cook without wine, onions, garlic, tomatoes, and mushrooms. If eating like Mikey will cure my headaches, I may have to start to bark, or teach Mikey to read (He already talks.)

Zucchini—Healthy?—Not always—But so good

Find Recipes for Zucchini Bread & Dog Biscuits Here

The four medium-sized shiny green zucchini talked to me this morning. They kept repeating “Zucchini Bread” until I resurrected a recipe left over from my cooking school days. Even then, in the early 70’s, I was sneaking whole wheat flour into cookies, cakes, and breads. The trick was always to fool my family, and I usually succeeded.

The Zucchini Bread was loaded with vegetable oil and sugar, but it did have zucchini and whole wheat flour. And it tasted really good.

All morning, the zucchini bread that I made, I’ll have to admit, just for me, keeps calling me back to the kitchen. If shiny zucchini talks, zucchini bread shouts. I haven’t stopped sampling it and had better freeze some of it or I’ll eat it all.

After mixing the zucchini bread in my old faithful Cuisinart machine, I used the same ingredients and messy tools to create some dog biscuits. Does Mikey really like them? The jury’s still out, but my parrots can’t get enough of them.

Was There Life Before the Cuisinart?

Is there one piece of equipment that changed my life in the kitchen? If you look at most of my recipes, within the first few lines I mention the food processor or Cuisinart.

In 1973 Zabar’s, the upper West Side Mecca for unusual food, announced that they would be selling the new Cuisinart machine at a discount. My mother, sister, and I met at Zabar’s and joined the other foodies in line on the first day that the Cuisinart was available. We all left with our trophies. I think it cost somewhere around $140, with Zabar’s discount that led to a lawsuit. Zabar’s won.

I remember they said the bowl was made of lexan, a plastic that was formulated for the space program. Plastic? Could it possibly last? It did. I remember breaking the tops off the blades so I could get them in the drawer—now they come that way.

Although I lived on Long Island at the time, I had to shop at Zabar’s because it was the only place I could buy masa harina, the stuff to make tortillas. Now I live in Miami and if I told people that I had to travel to get my masa, they would look at me like I was crazy. There’s a variety of masas available in every store that sells food, and Miami isn’t the only place to buy masa. It’s pretty universal, but I don’t know if there are many crazies out there who actually make homemade tortillas.

In that era, when cooking was a hobby and a passion, I used to make my own ravioli and sausages and had a cooking school in my house. I had to buy semolina in Little Italy and bread flour in hundred pound bags from the bakery supplier. When I lived in New York City and shopped at the local Vietnamese grocery store, I kept asking the grocer to get me bread flour, and he finally did. Now you can get bread flour and semolina in any grocery store.

Over the years I have amassed over 200 cookbooks, but still revert to the original recipes from Joanne’s Kitchen. When I was looking for a recipe for banana bread, I tried about four and finally settled on one that used a quarter pound of butter. Sorry, arteries, I cook with butter. I altered the recipe several times, replaced half of the white flour with whole wheat, and used it as the foundation for the pumpkin bread that is sitting on my counter summoning me to slice and eat. The companion pumpkin dog biscuits have been such a success that Mikey asks me for treats, knowing that I’ll give him a homemade biscuit rather than the store bought stuff he gets from my husband.

Now I have a later model Cuisinart. It’s bigger but very annoying—too safe and complicated. There’s not much I don’t do in the Cuisinart, from cutting vegetables and fruits for my birds to making bread dough. Because the Cuisinart is capable of kneading the dough, you have to be very careful when you add flour for a cake or anything leavened with baking soda or baking powder or you’ll end up with rubber.

My other latest greatest is a vita mix machine, my $400 blender. We still laugh at the day we were taken in by the vita mix man and bought one. It wasn’t a mistake. The prime use for my vita mix is making ice cream. (I hope the “vita” in the name is referring to “life” and not “vitamin.”) The vita mix is so powerful that it can even cook—if you can deal with the racket. No, I don’t prepare soup in my vita mix, but do use it to heat eggs for Caesar dressing and mayonnaise because I don’t like to consume raw eggs. I have to admit, though, that I’ve let it go too long and ended up with scrambled eggs on more than one occasion.

As much as I laugh at the “vita” in vita mix, I do try to use the right ingredients. My pumpkin bread contains whole wheat flour, as do most of the breads I make. When my children were small, they used to have meetings with the neighborhood kids on the front lawn, trying to figure out where they could get their hands on wonder (soft, squishy, white) bread. In school they traded their sandwiches on my 7 wholegrain cereal bread for the wonder kind.

Did they learn about good eating growing up in our house? I wish. My son’s house is stocked with all the junk he couldn’t get at home. I didn’t let them drink juice, just milk or water, because I thought that the fruit sugar was better consumed along with the fiber in the whole fruit. Everyone thought I was crazy, but now the common wisdom is that I was right. I apologize; they all raided the refrigerators in their friend’s houses looking for orange juice.

Now that everyone has moved out and my husband and I have only a Mikey dog and three parrots to feed, I’ve decided to try to forego a lot of packaged and prepared foods and treats in favor of people food. No, I’m not some sort of health food fanatic; I’m not interested in a raw or pure or green or macrobiotic or any other kind of fringe diet. I know I can feed my extended family the same food (with some exceptions) as we eat. As I make up recipes for dog food, I’ll spend the time to figure out the nutrients so no one is deprived and will use the dog treats only as a supplement to my parrots’ seed, nut, and raw fruit and vegetable diet.

So far I’ve made oatmeal dog biscuits and oatmeal cookies and pumpkin dog biscuits and pumpkin bread. It’s really easy and fun. As long as the kitchen is already a mess from the people food and the ingredients are on the counter, the dog food is a breeze. While the pumpkin bread was in the oven, I used the same messy Cuisinart bowl and tools to prepare the dough for the dog biscuits. The pumpkin bread and dog biscuits came out of the oven at the same time and Mikey and the birds were right there for samples.

Best of all, Mikey likes it.

Mikey Biscuits on the First Try

I did it! On the first try.  I made dog biscuits and Mikey liked them.

I received my dog-bone shaped cookie cutters, the ones I bought for $4.50 on Ebay, in the mail and had to try them out.

So I conducted my first experiment. Oatmeal cookies like the ones I can’t resist had to have some ingredients suitable for dogs, so I proceeded to test my very first recipe.  I used only a little bit of butter, eggs with the shells (for calcium), dried plums (because I didn’t have any other dried fruit besides raisins, the doggie No No), oatmeal, a little brown sugar, pumpkin pie spice (because I like the smell of it), 1% milk, pecans (the only nuts I had in my refrigerator), some salt and baking soda, and I put my trusty Cuisinart machine to work.

The only problem with my Mikey Biscuits is that they look like they are chocolate, thanks to the dried plums, but they look good, smell good, and, best of all Mikey likes them. They came out of the oven in under 30 minutes and I had to taste them…mmm…they tasted good to me, but I’m not as picky as Mikey.

Then Squawky, my very noisy hawk headed parrot, started in on his “Nut, Nut, Nut” plea. He thinks everything that tastes good to eat is a nut but he gets his point across. I’m convinced that parrots smell what I’m cooking. Even when my three don’t even know I’m cooking and can’t see the food, they demand samples. After I thought about the ingredients in my Mikey Biscuits, I realized that everything would be fine for the parrots.

The parrots loved my Mikey Biscuits. Every time they see me give one to Mikey, they ask for a bite. Parrots can safely eat more foods than dogs, so I may be on to something. They don’t like dog food, but I never thought about giving them dog treats.

As an aside, if you question my inclusion of brown sugar in my Mikey Biscuits, I believe that the sugars in fruits which are safe for dogs and birds are not very far removed from brown sugar so I concluded that a little sugar wouldn’t hurt either the dogs or birds. If we continue to think we’re not eating sugar when we eat fruit, we’ll continue to consume lots of sugar calories. Sure, we’re better off with the fruits with their fiber and vitamin content, but sugar is sugar.

Years ago, too many years I fear, I decided that I wouldn’t give my children fruit juice to drink. I always thought they were better off with the whole fruit and, if they were thirsty, water and milk were the right choices. My children accused me of child abuse and drank all the orange juice and apple juice in their friends’ refrigerators, but, what a concept, I’ve been proven to have been correct.

The dog biscuit experiment was a success, but now I have to make the people food equivalent, my favorite oatmeal cookies. I hope my willpower holds out because I love oatmeal cookies. Only time will tell.