Adventures in making dog food

 When I started making my own dog food, I never realized I'd be buying things like fish heads to toss into my instant pot.

The asian grocery is the place to find the best bits of what we westerners would think of as odd meat.

Want bull testicles? You can get 'em. Duck tongue? Apparently that's a delicacy.
I scour the clearance freezer and get stuff that's marked way down, as it's a little freezer burned or no longer within the sell-by date.

I'll be making beef for the dogs today, packing my pot with marrow bones, kidneys, some leftover oxtails, and the head of a fish (not sure the species, it's big lol). I have a chub of cheap ground beef to add later with the vegetables and then it's to the grinder.

Honestly, besides the time and mess, it's not any more expensive than buying decent mass produced dog food. At least I know exactly what's going into their food and yes, it's 'by products'. I have absolutely no problem with "by products" when they're named meats. "Meat by products" are the mystery ingredients that I'll avoid in commercial pet food but chicken by products are just the parts that WE don't eat.  

When it's all ground up, the dogs don't care. 

And the chicken meals I made actually smell like....chicken salad. It's a mix of chicken legs, leftover rotisserie chicken (bones included), gizzards and livers, with sweet potatoes, carrots, kale and eggshells all ground up. It smells good, like actual food and I could probably eat it if I wanted to. 

As I continue into my dystopian role as a survivalist (HAHAHAHHAHA), I'll be getting a hunting shotgun and fishing pole to add to my stash of "I gotta feed the dogs" so I can at least provide. Myself included, lol. 

I swear, as much as i love dystopian fiction, I never wanted to be Katniss Everdeen.