The Covert Vegetable

Project Home

I've been obsessed with audio recordings pretty much as long as I've been with home.  And today, after promising myself time and time again, that things would be different, I would stay in one place for a whole year, and I would get on with recording something, well that just didn't happen.  So I am moving in two weeks -- and trying to get another home on record before there's another waiting in its place.

P.S.  Please don't judge me too much on production quality -- the goal was the actually do something, so I gave myself an hour time limit.  Eeeksss ... but it will do!

Here's my recipe for Piper's breakfast.  While I am having cold cereal and lactaid, the darling pup is having a nutritious mix of vegetables, meat, and supplements.  I know this differs slightly from people who follow the strict BARF diet, but Piper enjoys it.

Step 1:  Start with fresh veggies.  I like to follow the rule-of-thumb that I try to incorporate at least three different veggies, of hopefully three different colors to diversify the types of nutrients she gets.   I normally put aside the vegetables that I don't want out of my own stash, in this little plastic bin for her.  They are still fine vegetables, but I perhaps have something a bit fresher or different.

DSC03406.JPG

Step 2:  Mix in a food processor.  I find that my food processor can hold enough veggies for about 3-4 days ... which is good.  They go bad after that.  Allegedly, you need to break up the veggies as small as possible, to make them digestible.

DSC03404.JPG

Step 3: Prepare the fresh ground meat.  I buy pet food from my local organic butcher, which is one of their more popular products.  They combine various meat scraps (still fresh, edible, and human-grade ... just not attractive cuts) with organ meat and freeze it in big sheets.  The cut them with a big saw into meal-sized chunks.

DSC03405.JPG

Step 4:  Put everything into the bowl.

DSC03410.JPG

Step 5:  Add a little bit of hot water.  I heard that this is a way to recreate the water found in the prey's stomach in the wild ... but basically it just makes everything easier to mix together.

DSC03411.JPG

Step 6:  Shake in a little bit of digestive enzymes.  I've read that it takes a year for dog's stomachs to regenerate their natural enzymes that are used to digest raw food and bones.  Piper often got sick and threw up a few times in her first two weeks on raw food -- a common symptom for dogs in detox.  Including digestive enzymes in her diet helped this quite a bit.

DSC03407.JPG

Step 7:  Then add in whatever supplements you use.  I add flax seeds, mostly because that's what's in the house right now.  When those run out, I will probably move on to something else that gives her some omega fatty acids.  This helps promote a good shiny coat and healthy skin.  If you want to add in flax seeds, then you need to grind them up or they aren't digested.

DSC03408.JPG

Step 8:  Mix it all together and there's the food!

DSC03412.JPG

This is in response to "God's Close-Up" question.

When I was in second grade, I remember coming home from Sunday School and asking my mother if I could use the stove to cook. 

She of course, said no, but wasn't very alarmed by the whole thing.  I always wanted to cook something, and I normally had to just use the microwave when she didn't want to help me.  (This meant, of course, that my speciality had developed an elaborate Ramen noodles dish with a precise ratio of of onion to parsley flakes.  Delicious, I know.  I was just amazed the microwave boiled water.  But I digress.)

So, I ran upstairs to change out of my church clothes.  I had a mission -- even if it had to take place in the microwave.

As far as I saw it, the nuns were setting up the rules with First Holy Communion that weren't much more complicated than the ones my parents had.  Being a very resourceful and sneaky kid, I never got in trouble at home.  I had to pick up the toys in the family room?  Well, you didn't say I had couldn't put them in the kitchen.  That kind of logic.  I figured Sunday School was no different. 

So the facts.  Fact 1:  I was a sinner.  Fact 2: If I died now, I went to hell.  Fact 3: If I had one of those communion wafers every Sunday, I didn't have any more sins.  So Fact 4:  Then I didn't go to hell.

What really worried me, is what if I did something bad on Monday.  I could very easily die on Tuesday.  And how then to avoid hell?

That's why I needed communion wafers -- and I needed them now.

I ran back outdoors, where my mother was planting flowers in the front yard.  "Mom, what do you think are in those wafers in church?"  I asked.

"Well, I don't know honey.  Flour?  Water?"  she said.  "Why don't you go have some lunch, and come outside and help me."

I assured her I would go make some "lunch" and hurried inside.

What I was really worried about was picking on my brother.  See, I really loved picking on my brother.  I figured that since he didn't like it, it was probably a sin.  With these wafers, I could pick on my brother, immediately eat a homemade communion wafer, and then be safe from hell.  I really *needed* these wafers.

I had to use a stepstool to get up on the counters, to reach glass mixing bowl, the plastic tub of floor, a wooden spoon.  And of course, the aluminium foil to lay the wafers on to cook.  Other than the fact that floor and water make a paste like elmer's glue, everything went well. 

Up until the foil.

Now, as some of you may know, you cannot put foil in the microwave.  The reason is, no matter how carefully you have layed out your flour-water-elemer's glue circles on your makeshift pan -- the foil just sparks.  More like catches on fire, really. 

And before I knew it, my Jesus wafers, looked like hell.