I hardly cook when we are in the condo, partly because I don't carry all my tools and spices and odds and ends up those 3 flights when we move in and partly it is because most of our social life there involves having dinner out with friends.

People food that is. All I seem to do is cook dog food anymore. I've been meaning to do a post on how this real food for the dogs thing is going.

Last spring, after the poison from China in dog food scandal, I did some reading on dog nutrition and decided to stop feeding our dogs packaged food.

I agree with a lot of the BARF (Bones And Raw Food) diet tenets but not all of them. So, I put our dogs on a modified BARF diet. I don't trust ground beef or eggs raw so I didn't want to feed that uncooked. I do think they need some carbohydrates and I wanted to feed them a better quality and stuff they can digest better.

Thus began the Prison Loaf! You probably don't want to know why I call it that, but that is what it's called around here.

Ground beef (that's 3 kilos at the top, cooking), brown rice or oats or barley, ground flax seed, a couple heads of garlic, a little salt, pureed vegetables (always carrots + yams or spinach or squash), and half a dozen eggs pureed with the shells (good source of calcium).

Mix it all together and weigh it and bag it and freeze it. That's Prison loaf!

I try to feed it to them 2 to 3 times a week. The other nights they get raw beef with beef bones, and sometimes raw chicken and bones.

Chicken is harder because to avoid bacterial problems, it has to be frozen for a couple days and then defrosted in the refrigerator before they get it. I do sometimes get a big bag of chicken wings and cut them up into parts, weigh them and freeze them.

Oh, every night they also get a food supplement called Missing Link sprinkled on their food and a dollop or two of live yogurt.

...and doggie vitamins and Chica gets a doggie Glucosamine & Chondroitin every night.

Just writing all this down is starting to make me feel like dressing them up in pink tutus would be easier and just as sane. I wonder what Paris Hilton's dogs eat?

OK, so now you know I'm nuts and that I pay much more attention to my dog's diets than I ever do to my own. It's starting to seem like I also may spend more money on their diet. Probably not, not if you count the restaurant bills.

It really was pretty manageable with just 2 dogs. I could make prison loaf once every 2 weeks, this batch I photographed ended up as 21, 10oz bags to be frozen. I used to only start with 2 kilos of meat though, so I'd make about 15 bags every couple weeks.

Then we got Cuba! The puppy with the hollow legs and the insatiable appetite. She wasn't gaining weight even when I was giving her 2 bags a night. So, I upped it to 2 bags in the morning and 2 bags at night. Or, on raw meat days, she got twice what the other 2 got at night and 2 bags of prison loaf in the morning. She still wasn't gaining weight.

Finally, we bought some french puppy food and I add a cup of that to each of her meals. Now she is putting on a little weight and is not as skinny. Why french dog food? I don't know, the vet carries it and I have delusions that it won't be as tainted as the US brands.

Still, she eats 4 times as much food as each of the other dogs! + the french stuff. It's a lot of raw meat to buy, it's definitely a lot of prison loaf to cook and the whole process is beginning to take over my life.

Mimi had the nerve to mention the other day that maybe I should consider just going back to feeding them dry food. I actually thought about it, which I wouldn't have done a month ago.

I'm still thinking about it. For one thing, Cuba is eating prison loaf more than I like. She's getting it almost every morning. She still gets over a pound of raw meat most nights plus lots of raw bones. But, feeding her a kilo (2.2 lbs) of meat a day is too much to have around and too much for my small freezer.

What could I do with all that time I'm now spending making prison loaf? ...I could have my freezer back, not always full of dog food! ...I could put People Food in it!! Maybe I could even start cooking people food again? ...I could buy them cute little sweaters and outfits instead of making all their food? Nah! That's crazy!