Kara DuLac-Shields

So I’m working a job now where I don’t get home until after 8:15 p.m., but Rick is working a more normal schedule. That means that he gets home hungry for dinner three hours before I’ll even be hopping into the Buick Regal to wend my scenic way back to the nest. If I start fixing dinner when I get home, that means we’ll be eating as late as 9:30 p.m., and it’s not healthy for Rick to go to bed at 10 p.m. with a full stomach.

And unless I’ve been exceptionally proactive and motivated that morning, it means Rick is either cooking hamburgers/hot dogs/sloppy joes for himself, or eating (yet another) peanut butter and jelly sammich.

And we all know exactly how proactive and motivated I am in the morning, which is -4 on a scale of 1 to 10, so my Wonderful Pumpkin eats hisself a LOT of PB&J.

“Don’t worry,” he says trying to make me feel better, “I really LIKE peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.” That doesn’t really work, because the Pumpkin likes a lot of different foods, but it doesn’t mean that he should eat them for days and days on end. Nutritionally speaking it doesn’t seem balanced, and I worry that it might eventually cause him to snap, and I’ll come home from work to find the entire 7-pound jar of Peter Pan we found at Sam’s Club pasted over the whole kitchen.

Rick insists he can’t cook, which is really not true. The man can make a mean chicken stir-fry on his own, with just the envelope of stir-fry seasoning mix from the store, which is still home-made in my eyes. He could do that before we met.

“But I can’t just go into the kitchen and say ‘Oh, we’ll have pan-fried chicken tenderloins with cole slaw and biscuits for dinner tonight’ and fix it,” he says to me. I have to remind him that I started cooking and baking when I was old enough to hold a hand mixer steady in a bowl of cookie dough, and anyone with 33 years experience in anything is going to be ‘better’ at it than someone with less.

When I was on the fire department in Highland Township, I’d be in the middle of fixing dinner when my pager would go off, and I’d have to abandon everything to respond. In the middle of grabbing my stuff and listening to the address of the call, I’d be giving Rick instructions on how to finish fixing all the food that was in-progress at that moment. “Finish steaming this until it’s fork-tender, drain and mash the potatoes with butter, milk and salt & pepper, and pull the biscuits out when they’re nicely browned on top!”

And when I returned, dinner was always done perfectly. So the man can cook–he just doesn’t know it.

Or maybe he doesn’t want to know it.

But I’ve been fretting lately over how poorly nourished we are, and the more often we opt for pizza or take-out food, the more money we waste on junk that just fills our stomachs without really doing us any good. We’ve got to figure out a way for us to have home-cooked meals with me on this crazy schedule.

The logical thing to do would be to plan the weekly meal menu, and then do as much of the food prep as possible ahead of time, either on the weekend or in the morning. I’d then leave instructions for Rick on how to finish preparing the meal, and he could have a hot, homemade meal when he’s ready for it, and I could have leftovers when I get home.

Again, though, that’s assuming that I can remain focused and motivated to plan all this ahead of time, stick to the schedule, and peel potatoes at 8 a.m. on days OTHER than Thanksgiving.

So we joined E-Mealz, to get their weekly menu plan and shopping list that will allow us to save money while still eating well. We were pretty gung-ho about it, until I looked at the first menu plan.

It sounds lovely, and I’d be very pleased to be working with a ready-made meal plan with such wonderful food, mostly from scratch. But I’m not the one who’d be doing most of this prep–Rick would.

I looked at the first recipe, Chicken Dijon, which calls for two chicken breasts pounded to 1/4″ thickness, and asked him “Are you okay with doing all this prep and cooking?” And then I knew that for this first week, at least, that Rick would be eating PB&J.

This weekend, we’ll take a look at the menu plan and see how much we can collaborate on the food prep.  I’ll let you know how that works out.

I love my toaster oven. I’d even go as far as to say that it’s an essential piece of kitchen gear.

It’s not often that I endorse a specific piece of kitchen equipment. Many tasks have been accomplished over the years using nothing more than a good knife, a sufficiently-large cutting board and basic cookery equipment. I’ve never owned a food processor, nor have I wanted one.

Yes, using a food processor can save you a lot of prep time. You could process all the potatoes for a batch of potato soup in a matter of SECONDS. But then the time it takes to break down and clean the food processor offsets that time saved. It’s so much quicker to keep a sink full of hot, soapy water and wash the knife and cutting board as you go.

We DID have a juicer, once. Once. But it was such a complicated travesty of parts and disks and doohickeys that to use and dissemble it to clean it was a multiple-hour task. We weren’t dedicated enough to the idea of juicing to continue to use it.

We do have a breadmaker that I’ve begun to use again, just for the joy of freshly-baked bread. If you’ve read any of my past blog postings, you may recall my battle to make bread from scratch–I really do feel this is something I should be able to do by myself, without the help of a machine…but I’m lazy. I’ll work on the bread skills later.

I don’t want to mislead you–we do have kitchen equipment with very specialized uses. Of course we have a coffee maker, which just makes coffee, and we have several slow-cookers, which only cook food very slowly. We also have a blender, which is used very seldom, and a Fry-Daddy, which is used more often than I care to admit.

But our toaster oven is the most-used piece of kitchen equipment we have. It warms left-over pizza much more appealingly than the microwave, and if we’re having pasta it heats up to crisp frozen garlic bread in seconds rather than preheating the entire full-sized oven, using much less electricity in the process.

Hot appetizers and baked sandwiches can happen in the toaster oven with much less fuss than the full-sized oven, and I can prepare a hot Westminster dip before dinner even though the oven temperature is different than what’s needed for the entrée.

And anytime we feel like a fresh biscuit, we can take some frozen biscuit dough from the freezer and bake one (or eight) up in a snap. I’ve heard that one can do that same thing with cookie dough, but I’ve always just baked the whole batch of cookies rather than putting some aside to freeze.

All in all, a toaster oven with temperature control is a fast, efficient way to bake small batches of baked goods and not use lots of electricity heating the big oven and then cooling the house. I would strongly recommend a quality toaster oven for every small household.

I’m becoming quite a fan of measuring by weight rather than by volume.  It seems so much more accurate to say “8 ounces of shortening” as opposed to cramming an amount of shortening that you HOPE is sufficient and lacking any sizable air bubbles into a one-cup measuring cup.

And now that I’m buying butter in one-pound bricks from Sam’s Club instead of quartered, paper-wrapped pounds from the grocery store, I’ve had to get good at doing the math in my head to convert volume measurements to weight.  Instead of just slicing off “one tablespoon” from the quarter-pound stick, it’s necessary to run through all the math and weight equivalents in order to calculate that one tablespoon of butter weighs a half-ounce.  And one half-ounce of butter will always be exactly that, doesn’t matter what form it’s in, a half-ounce of butter will always weigh a half ounce. But if I’m slicing a tablespoon off the stick, and the quarter-pound stick wasn’t wrapped absolutely straight at the factory, I may end up with more or less butter by depending on those little lines printed on the paper.

But oi vey, the MATH.  It hurts me sometimes.

As a result I’ve gotten pretty good at guesstimating the volume of food to equal the desired weight.  Doesn’t seem to matter whether it’s a solid like butter or shortening, or a grainy powder like sugar or flour, I can get pretty close just by eyeing it up! Cool, no? Or does this count as a “stupid human trick”?

In my younger days I worked as prep cook under an amazing Hungarian woman who could pour an absolutely correct amount of seasoning into her palm straight from the package.  Need a teaspoon of salt? Here it is. A half-teaspoon of cinnamon? There ya go. She might not always wear her teeth to work, but the day she showed me how she could use her palm to measure out tablespoon after accurate tablespoon of parsley, I was her biggest fan. For a long time I worked on being able to do the same, and now after 22 years I might be getting close.

Anyway, I ran to Food City a few days ago to get some beans and cheese for a batch of chili.  Only bought a half-pound of cheese because the price wasn’t that great and I only needed a little bit to grate over the chili.  So I’m studying the cheese, which is labled as an 8-ounce brick.  I’m looking at it, and thinking that it doesn’t look quite like a half-pound of cheese, so I get out my trusty digital scale:

No, it's actually 7 and 8/10 ounces. Not quite a half-pound.

Hmph.  I KNEW it didn’t look like a full half-pound of cheese. Whatever that may look like.

So, what does it matter, you ask?  So I didn’t get a full eight ounces of cheese, even though I paid for it–so WHAT? The problem lies in the fact that if every package of cheese is 1/5 of an ounce short, then the cheese distributor is selling that 1/5 of an ounce twice. We’re being charged for it, but we’re not getting it. The cheese people are shorting the individual consumer so they can make a little more money.

It’s a small bitch, but it’s my bitch, nonetheless. And if everything is inaccurately packed like this cheese, think how much each of us consumers are being cheated.

It’s one thing to watch the size of a candy bar shrink from 3 ounces, to 2.75 ounces, to 2.15 ounces, and remain the same price. It’s a given that food will get more expensive, and either prices must go up or we must get less food for the same price–check out the big tubs of yogurt the next time you’re at the grocery store.  They used to contain 32 ounces of yogurt and now the same-sized tub only holds 24 ounces.  There’s a 3/4 inch gap between the yogurt level and the top of the tub. Mmmm…vanilla yogurt with wheat germ…had to get a bowl as part of my ‘research.’  But I digress.

I didn’t take my digital scale to the grocery store to measure each of the packages of cheese there.  It’s possible that each package of cheese differs slightly, either above or below the listed weight.  Sure, some customers may actually receive 8 1/5 ounces of cheese.  Maybe it was just my day to be on the short end of the stick. But that isn’t ideal, either.  You should get exactly what you pay for, whether it’s eight ounces of cheese or eight ounces of blasting powder, and that package stated that it contained eight ounces of cheese.

Wanna know what 2/10 of an ounce of cheese looks like?  Here ’tis:

Okay, so it's grated. Try to use your imagination and picture it as a chunk.

Yesterday I decided to make a pot of bean soup.  I learned two things as a result of my shopping trip that day: 1.) That it’s probably impossible to get a ham bone from the meat counter at a grocery store, and 2.) that a four-pound bag of dried Northern beans makes a HECKUVA lot of beans.

Talked with the guy behind the meat counter at Kroger, and he explained that they don’t save bones anymore, except for the really huge cow leg bones that people want as chewies for their dogs.  He did, however, point me in the direction of pre-packaged, smoked pork neck bones, which will work admirably for the meaty, smoky base.  You really do need the bone in order to get a good, appealing soup stock, in my little opinion.

Next came the beans.  Money’s still kind of tight, so I stood there with my calculator, ciphering the per-pound cost of dried Northern beans in the different-sized bags.  The four-pound bag brought the cost of the beans down to about $1 per pound, so that’s the one I went with.

Bear in mind that I’m not a stupid person.  Intellectually, I know that cooking legumes or grains will roughly double their bulk, i.e. cooking one cup of rice with one cup of liquid results in two cups of cooked rice.  But sometimes I have a little problem with spatial rationalization:  I knew that I’d end up with a lot of beans when I finally cooked them, but I didn’t stop to consider that if I soaked them all, I would not have a stock pot big enough to cook them.

And sometimes I’m just an absent-minded ditz.

So I start putting the stuff together for the soup, starting with sorting and soaking the dried beans.  If you’ve never worked with dried beans before, you should know that before you do anything else with them, you need to sort through them and pick out small rocks, bits of twig or grass, suspect-looking beans and any other ‘stuff’ that you don’t want to eat.  Then you rinse them thoroughly, and do either a fast soak or an overnight soak to rehydrate them.

It took me an awful long time to sort through that four-pound bag of beans.  That should have been my first clue to slow down and re-evaluate the situation.  It felt like I was hunched over that colander FOREVER, picking out discoloured and munched-on-looking beans.  But did I stop and think about what I was about to do?  Aw, hell no!

I got out my four-quart stockpot and dumped the beans in, and filled the rest of it nearly to the top with water.  Yeah, that was another moment in which I could have calculated the volume of beans I’d have to cope with, but I didn’t hesitate there, either.  I was thinking of other things, like our rescue’s Angel Trees at AgriFeed here in Knoxville and Smoky Mountain Feed in Maryville, and how best to print pictures of the adoptable fuzzies from Small Breed Rescue of East Tennessee and Cocker Companions Rescue.  It’s safe to say that I was a bit distracted–not enough so to screw up the soup, but sufficiently to miss the significance of the bean poundage.

To do a ‘fast soak’, put the beans in a large pot and pour roughly twice their volume of cool, clean water over them.  Bring the pot of beans to a boil and maintain the boil for two minutes, then cover the pot and remove it from the heat, letting it sit for the next hour.  Voila!  When you return to the pot, you’ll have rehydrated beans which you can then proceed to cook.

When I came back to check out my beans an hour later, the stock pot was FULL of them.  They’d gladly sucked up almost all the water and climbed almost to the lip of the stockpot, and they overflowed my big white colander when I drained and rinsed them.  All in all, that four-pound bag of dried Northern beans made 8.28635 pounds of beans.  Let’s just call it 8 1/4 pounds.  Which is quite a lot.  More than I had anticipated.  Don’t know what I was thinking.

Anyway.  I fixed a big batch of bean soup with half the beans, and then divided the rest into two big Gladware bowls to be covered with water and frozen. I couldn’t just toss the remaining four pounds of beans, because if I did that, I’d be wasting money–even though my original intent was to save money.  If you buy something in a large package because it’s less-expensive that way, but then you don’t USE it all, you’re not saving money in the long run.  You may as well have just bought a smaller package that didn’t scare you so badly to begin with, and avoided wasting the excess food.

Nice part of this little debacle is that the next time I want to make bean soup, I won’t have to go through the tiresome sorting-and-soaking routine again.  Nasty part is that I don’t really know WHEN I’ll feel like making bean soup again.  If ever.  *sigh*

For Sunday breakfast, we had home made French toast and turkey bacon.  The turkey bacon is kind of an unusual food in our house, because we both have a deep and abiding love for real bacon.  And aside from being somewhat healthier than regular bacon, there aren’t too many benefits to eating a form of pig meat made of fowl.

But I had a coupon for it and thought we’d give it a try.

It was OKAY.  It looked a little odd, because instead of white fat and red meat, it had strips of tan-ish and brown-ish meat, with one of the edges formed into a regular scallop shape–same shape, same colours for each strip.  It was smoky tasting, like regular bacon, but the texture was different, probably due to a significantly lower fat content.

Rick and I like our bacon crispy to the point of almost being burnt so that’s the way I fixed the turkey bacon.  It produced an astonishing amount of blue smoke and never really got truly crispy.  As far as using turkey bacon in place of regular bacon in a recipe, it should work because the main characteristic of bacon in a recipe is the smoky flavor.  I suppose if we were on medically-necessary low-fat diets, I would consider buying this on a regular basis, but we’re not yet, so I won’t.

Oddly enough it tastes a lot better when it’s eaten out of the sandwich bag while standing in front of the refrigerator at midnight.

Let’s talk about those wonderful, colorful little sugar cookies sold in supermarkets, coated with 1/4″ of frosting and covered in seasonally-color-coordinated sprinkles.  Also, the teeny, ‘two-bite’ brownies and muffins and carrot cakes which beckon to us from inside their sterile plastic clam shells stacked neatly on the baking racks near the deli.

What exactly is their draw?  I’m asking because I’m frustrated–and I’m also completely addicted to them.  If it’s got any color frosting on it, I’m intrigued.  Add the incredible lure of non-pareils, jimmies, sprinkles, colored sugars, cinnamon red hots, teeny marzipan fruits and even those little edible silver balls that look like BBs, and I’m purchasing the item in question.

But the weird thing about store-bought baked goods that are decorated in frostings and gewgaws is that they are usually devoid of taste.  I just bought some festive little cupcakes from my favorite supermarket (Super Target, duh), which easily expressed half their bulk in red and white frosting and little red, white and blue star-shaped sprinkles.  The frosting was sweet, as expected, and the little stars were kind of tough as well as kind of sweet.  The cake of the cupcake was dry and somewhat coarse, as if the batter had been beaten too long, or maybe had too much flour.

I contrasted these festive little tarts with the banana bread muffins I’d just made earlier that day, and was struck by the difference in taste and quality.  My banana bread muffins were really wonderful, moist, sweet and just the right texture–springy and chewy but not tough or dry at all.  The muffins were hugely better than the little cupcakes, so why didn’t I want them rather than those sad, tarted-up little pretenders?

Is their draw solely in the cosmetic appeal of the frosting and sprinkles?  Spraying air freshener and Pledge around your home makes it smell better, but it doesn’t actually clean anything.  And I know women who ‘frost themselves’ with makeup and hair treatments, and men who ‘frost themselves’ with sporty automobiles and cologne, but they don’t actually taste any better once you metaphorically bite into them either.

Is it because food made by someone else has an air of mystery and is thus more appealing?  My friend Karen says that her husband makes her the BEST peanut butter sandwiches.  She can stand right alongside him and make the same sandwich that he does, and his will taste better.

As a prep cook in my teenage years, I’ve experienced this.  All day long I worked with food, all different kinds of food.  At that time I was obsessed with corned beef, and could probably eat a whole roast by myself if given the opportunity.  But part of my duties as a prep cook was to roast all the meats used for sandwiches and salads that day, and frequently I’d chuck two or three corned beefs (beeves?)  into the oven along with turkeys, chickens, and whatever else we were serving later on.

After roasting and cooling, I’d slice the meats and package them appropriately.  And after handling all that meat every day, it didn’t take long before corned beef in its ‘unrefined’ state lost its draw for me.  BUT if one of the up-front cooks made me a sammich of corned beef and spinach or romaine lettuce on a croissaint with a side of those wonderfully crispy plank fries, well, then I could be persuaded to eat!

I think that having someone else (ANYone else!) fuss over our food makes it more appealing, even if it doesn’t actually taste any different.  Cooking or baking for someone else is a way to nurture them and show caring, and the more time and effort that goes into the dish, the more appreciation we have for it.  An obviously homemade peanut butter cookie with crosshatches in its crispy top from a fork always tastes better than a bar cookie made from a similar recipe.

I guess we can conclude that “caring” is the super-secret special ingredient in home-made food.  Doesn’t it feel good to do something nice for someone you care about?  So go ahead and indulge someone today by making them something special!  Here’s a cute trick for creating little nummies that look special without spending a whole lot of time on them:  Use packaged brownie mix, prepared frosting and sprinkles to create frosted brownie cookies.  You end up with something that feels very celebratory and indulgent without the effort and fuss that would accompany, say, cut-out cookies.  Enjoy!

So late last night, I got home from work and fed/watered/pottied the dawgs and settled myself down in front of my computers for a little Facebooking and WoW’ing, and all of a sudden I realize that I want OLIVES.  All kinds, and lots of ‘em.

This isn’t an unusual craving, although I haven’t had it for a while.  I usually prefer to eat them with my fingers from a little dish, with a side plate of Carr’s Table Water crackers and some cheese, and sometimes I’ll have this combination as a meal.

But I haven’t been to the grocery store for a while and haven’t bought any olives lately.  That’s okay–they’re like a staple.  Everybody’s got olives!

I toodle out to the refrigerator and discover that my entire olive stock consists of four pimiento-stuffed Manzanilla and six of those darling little Niçoise olives.  They’re darling, and I love them, but I was actually HOPING for about a pound of Kalamata and a whole can of extra large pitted ripe olives.  I made do.

And yes, olives are on the shopping list, and yes, I’m actually GOING TO THE STORE TODAY.

Most dogs love to eat, and most dogs will try to eat anything, including some things that aren’t technically food.  As an example, our houseguest, Rocket, just ate my used Breathe Right nose strip yesterday morning.  I noticed that he was chewing determinedly on something, but he didn’t have a toy or anything else suitable for chewing in front of him.

When I investigated by swiping my finger around the inside of his mouth, I found a portion of the plastic bands and some of the chewy adhesive ‘cloth’ that binds the strips to the nose.  Since they’re small and flexible, I retrieved what he hadn’t swallowed, and knew that I’d have to watch him to make sure he could get rid of the rest of it.

It’s accepted (hopefully for obvious reasons!) that dogs shouldn’t eat non-food items like socks and furniture and nose strips, but actual food is a little trickier.  Because dogs are willing to eat pretty much anything people have the misconception that it’s safe to feed them anything, including spoiled food and stuff that we eat regularly.

With regard to ‘dog food’, food that is prepared specifically for the consumption of dogs, we must think about two properties:  The QUALITY of the prepared dog food, and the INGREDIENTS.  We as American consumers have an inordinate amount of trust in commercial manufacturers, believing that capitalistic companies motivated by profit (greed) would never sell us a product which contains less-than-wholesome ingredients.  For human food and products, we rely somewhat on governmental agencies to evaluate and police products (peanut-butter-flavored salmonella, anyone?) but the agencies established to control the quality of animal feed isn’t as comprehensive.

If you’d like to learn more about dog food and what goes into it, go to Sabine Contreras’ website and prepare to be shocked and horrified about what you may have been feeding your dog. The pretty pictures of happy dogs eating nutritious-looking food on the bag often belies what’s inside each and every piece of kibble.

After you’ve learned more about evaluating the ingredients of your dog’s prepared food, there’s more to consider in terms of your dog’s tolerance for those ingredients.  Some ingredients like BHA/BHT are a no-brainer–we wouldn’t want to eat an unstable chemical used to preserve food, so we wouldn’t want to put that in our dog’s dish, either.  But something like corn is pretty harmless, right?  Not to some dogs.  Corn in any form is difficult, if not impossible, for dogs to digest, and many forms offer no nutritional value at all.  At best, it’s a cheap filler and binder in dog foods that increases the bulk of the dog’s stool.  In other words, feed your dog a food with corn as one of the main ingredients, and you’ll be picking up way bigger poops because the dog will just excrete whatever it can’t ‘use.’

At worst, your dog may be allergic to corn, and feeding your dog a food with corn in any form (whole-grain corn, corn meal, corn siftings, corn syrup, corn gluten meal, etc.) can cause him to suffer allergy symptoms like ear infections, skin irritation and hair loss, or more severe symptoms like diarrhea.

I had never encountered a problem with food allergies until our English springer spaniel, Riley Newton, joined the family in October 2006.  He seemed to be a very hairy dog with ‘gooey’ ears who shed an amazing amount of hair and made constant soft-serve-type poops.  As it turns out, the high-quality kibble that he and Belle were eating contained chicken and wheat, which are on the list of common food allergens for dogs.  Changing Rye’s food to a limited-ingredient diet containing only duck meat and potato cleared up his ears, his incredible shedding, and firmed up his stool.  Now I’m very careful to feed Rye things like vegetables and fruits as treats, and I avoid heavily processed foods and treats which may contain common allergens.

Since I’m a lazyass and a terrible dog mother, I haven’t done any real analysis to determine what exactly Rye is allergic to.  Instead I avoid anything which may contain the four common allergens:  Wheat, corn, beef and chicken.  Since our other three don’t display any symptoms of food allergies, they eat a less-expensive but still high-quality kibble.  And no one gets table scraps!

So that’s dog food, in particular.  But what about giving your dogs bits and pieces of foods from your own kitchen as a treat?  My kids like to gather around me when I’m chopping veggies, just in case I drop something or feel generous enough to treat them with a sample.  But there are some foods that dogs should never have, even though we humans can tolerate them without a problem.  Recently I learned quite a lot about foods which can harm dogs while I was researching an article for a rescue group’s newsletter.  I’m going to copy and paste it in here.  Please bear in mind that I’m not a nutritionist, and that I’m not a doctor, and I don’t even play one on TV, so if you see something with which you disagree, remember that this is not a comprehensive list and that I’m not always right.  I’m just a concerned dog mother who wants to share this info with everyone.

“Human Food No-Nos,” by Kara DuLac-Shields  Copyright 2008-2009

We love our dogs, and as a way to express our love for them, sometimes we give them bits of food as treats.  However, “food does not equal love,” especially for dogs.  Many foods that we as humans eat without even a second thought can be toxic for dogs, for a number of different reasons.

We need to remember that our dogs are very different from humans physiologically.  Dogs are generally smaller than us, they have different teeth, different body chemistry, and far shorter digestive systems from us, which make some human foods dangerous for dogs.

For example, you and I could go to the bar and choose to have a beer–or several beers, and some chicken wings, and cheese sticks, maybe smoke a few cigarettes, and then we could take some aspirin when we get home.  One beer, or even several beers, might make us feel bad the next morning, but it’s unlikely that a healthy adult could die from drinking a beer.  Likewise, the chicken wings and cheese sticks wouldn’t kill us immediately, although we would be healthier if we avoided them.

But for dogs, even a small amount of alcohol could prove fatal, by depressing their central nervous system and putting them into a coma.  Likewise for tobacco–although dogs don’t often smoke, they may eat your cigarettes or chewing tobacco, and the nicotine is out-and-out poisonous.

And the bones in the chicken wings could splinter and cut your dog’s digestive system, or even become lodged in their intestines, which are much smaller in diameter than our own.  The cheese sticks have a high fat content, which can precipitate a disease in dogs called pancreatitis, which can cause death.  And then there’s the aspirin–while it might relieve pain for a short time, it could also eat a hole through the delicate lining of the dog’s stomach.

Not many people would take their dog to the bar and set it up with a pitcher, the munchie sampler and a Tiparillo, but consider what you toss to your dog as a treat in your own kitchen.  Be diligent in even reading the ingredient labels of the food you give your dog–even harmless-looking stuff like baby food can contain onion powder, which is toxic for dogs.  We are two very different species, and therefore have different dietary needs.  So in order to show our love to our four-legged kids with tails, we do need to say ‘no’ occasionally, just like any responsible parent.  Check the list below for some doggie dietary no-nos.

Fruit, Vegetables & Nuts:

Avocadoes: The avocado fruit, pit, and plant/tree are all toxic to dogs.  Hopefully you don’t have a guacamole fan.

Broccoli: Although your dog would have to eat a wagon load of broccoli to experience problems, it can be toxic in large quantities due to a compound called isothiocyanate, which can cause gastrointestinal irritation.  Just make sure broccoli makes up no more than 10% of your dog’s diet.

Grapes & raisins:  Have an unknown toxin which causes kidney failure in dogs.

Onions & garlic:  Contain thiosulfate (garlic in far lower amounts than onions) which destroys red blood cells & causes anemia.  This also builds up in the dog’s system, so even if they only eat a little bit at a time, repeated ingestion can result in toxic levels.  Humans have the necessary enzymes to break down thiosulfates–dogs don’t.

Tomatoes: The stems and leaves of the tomato plant are especially toxic, containing a lot of oxalates, which cause bladder stones.  Some have also attributed cardiac problems to the tomato itself, which is a member of the nightshade family.

Pits/seeds:  Most fruit pits contain a form of cyanide, although the flesh of fruits like apples, cherries, and peaches themselves are great snacks for dogs.  Pits can also cause intestinal blockages.

Mold/Spoiled food:  Mold and food-poisoning pathogens can be harmful to your dog.  Even though they don’t often suffer with food poisoning symptoms because their digestive systems are so much shorter than ours, it’s best not to take chances.  Don’t give your dog spoiled food–in short, if you won’t eat it, your dog shouldn’t, either.

Mushrooms: Wild and domestic mushrooms can be toxic for your dog.  There are very few types that are completely safe, so it’s best just to avoid them.

Nuts:  Macadamia and walnuts can cause weakness, muscle tremors and paralysis, so avoid them.  However, other nuts like peanuts (which is actually a legume and not a ‘tree nut’) and Brazil nuts can be healthy for your dog, in moderation.  Brazil nuts actually contain selenium, which is a vital nutrient for both your dog and you.

Persimmons:  Can cause intestinal blockage.

Potato peelings, green potatoes, green tomatoes, and rhubarb leaves: Contain oxalates, which can harm the nervous, digestive, and urinary systems, causing bladder stones.  And  by the way, rhubarb leaves are toxic no matter to which species you belong!

From the Spice Cupboard:

Nutmeg: Affects the nervous system and can cause hallucinations, seizures and death.

Salt, Baking Soda, & Baking Powder: Too much salt can damage your dog’s kidneys.  And in large amounts, they all can unbalance your dog’s electrolytes, leading to muscle spasm and congestive heart failure.

Xylitol: Damages the liver and kidneys and even a tiny bit can cause liver failure, resulting in death.  Keep your dog out of your purse and away from your sugar-free mints and chewing gum!

Yeast dough:  Can ‘rise’ in your dog’s digestive system and obstruct or actually rupture the stomach or intestines.  Fermenting yeast also produces alcohol, which can lead to alcohol poisoning.

Meat, Fish, Dairy:

Eggs:  Raw eggs can cause Salmonella poisoning.

Fish: Some raw fish can also cause salmonella poisoning;  raw salmon can cause “salmon poisoning.”  It can contain a parasite which hosts rickettsia, a bacterial pathogen that can sicken or kill your dog if the infection isn’t treated with antibiotics in time; tuna fish contains a lot of mercury, a heavy metal that also accumulates in fatty tissue, so large amounts of tuna should be avoided.

Bones:  Most bones should NOT be given (especially chicken or ‘spare rib’ bones) because they all can splinter and lacerate the digestive tract, or pose a choking hazard by becoming stuck in your dog’s throat.  They’re not all bad, though.  Appropriately-sized bones do offer valuable minerals and nutrients, and chewing on a hard object like a bone will clean your dog’s teeth and strengthen their jaw muscles, as well as provide entertainment for your dog.  If you do want to give your dog a bone, make sure that you have a large-enough bone like a beef knuckle that your dog can’t swallow whole, and always supervise your dog’s chewing, because there’s always a possibility that a piece of bone could splinter.  Also be aware that raw bones can harbor bacteria like salmonella, which is more a threat to humans than to dogs.  If you want to cook your dog’s bones to reduce the possibility of culturing bacteria, do so by boiling them rather than baking them, which tends to make them brittle.

Dairy Products:  Beware of fatty dairy products like butter and cream, which can precipitate pancreatitis.  In a less-serious vein, some dogs can also be lactose intolerant, which leads to gas and diarrhea, but for  50% of dogs, small amounts of yogurt, cheese or cottage cheese can be nourishing.

Fatty Meats:  Again, fatty meats have the capacity to induce pancreatitis.  Avoid them.

“The Finer Things in Life:”

Alcohol:  Wine, beer, tequila, Nyquil, doesn’t matter what kind–any form of alcohol can lead to coma or death.

Hops plugs:  Used in beer making, hops plugs contain whole-leaf hops which bear resins, essential oils, phenols, and nitrogenous compounds which can cause abdominal distension and pain, tachycardia and death.

Chocolate:  Although your dog may tell you he LOVES chocolate, it doesn’t love him.  Chocolate contains caffeine and an alkaloid compound called theobromine, which act as a cardiac stimulant and diuretic.  That is, they speed up your dog’s heart and make him whiz too much.  In large-enough amounts, chocolate can lead to dehydration, seizures, and death.  White and milk chocolate have the lowest amounts of theobromine, and baker’s semisweet chocolate has the highest.

Coffee/tea/soft drinks:  Are all hazardous due to their caffeine content.  Remember to dispose of your coffee grounds and tea bags properly, too–dogs can sometimes have a strange attraction to stuff like this.

Cigarettes/Cigars/Chewing Tobacco/Nicotine Patches/Nicotine Gum: Nicotine is an alkaloid poison, toxic enough that it’s used as a pesticide.  It’s poisonous to everyone, not just dogs–when humans get a dizzy rush and faint nausea on smoking their first cigarette, that’s a mild case of nicotine poisoning.  In dogs that have ingested enough nicotine, the poison can paralyze their diaphragm (breathing) muscle and cause cardiac problems, up to heart failure.

NSAIDs/Aspirin/Ibuprofen:  In large doses, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs can cause ulcers, and damage kidneys by reducing blood flow to vital organs.  Administer these to your dog only on the advice of your veterinarian.

Tylenol/Acetaminophen:  Should NEVER be given to dogs or cats.  Causes severe tissue damage to cells, and dogs and cats don’t have enough of the liver enzymes necessary to effectively break this chemical down into its harmless components.

Human Vitamin Supplements: Many vitamins manufactured for human use contain levels of nutrients and minerals, particularly iron, which are too concentrated for dogs to digest safely.  They can cause kidney failure and liver damage.

If you’re ever in doubt about a food treat, don’t give it to your dog.  And if your dog gets hold of something bad, call the ASPCA’s Poison Hotline at (888) 426.4435.

Sources:

http://www.marvistavet.com/

http://www.petplace.com

http://www.avma.org/careforanimals/animatedjourneys/livingwithpets/poisoninfo.asp#Misc3

http://www.dog-first-aid-101.com/toxic-foods.html

http://www.animalpetsandfriends.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theobromine_poisoning

Is it just me, or is it getting more and more difficult to find a decent can of tuna lately?  It seems that a few years ago, you could open up a can of ordinary tuna and see recognizable FISH flesh, not just mush.  Now, if you buy anything less than albacore tuna, you have a can of what looks like pureed fish mixed with water.  Hard to drain, no recognizable texture, kinda repellent.

So is it just me?  Was commercially processed canned tuna always like this?  Or has the quality fallen off in the past decade?  And if so, why has it fallen off?  Have there been changes in the handling methods that degrade the quality of the tuna, or is it just poorer quality meat that’s making it into the cans?

I admit that lately I’ve been springing for the more-expensive “albacore” tuna simply because it still looks like fish when it comes out of the can.  *sigh*

Rick and I like to watch Chef Gordon Ramsey abuse his supplicants on Hell’s Kitchen, and one of the staple dishes on that show seems to be risotto, which many of the contestants seem to have problems preparing. Apparently if you can’t cook risotto by the time you get to compete on Hell’s Kitchen, you should just go back home and go to bed permanently.

Rick insists that I’m a fabulous cook and that I should open a restaurant.  One problem with that idea is that I’m a huge lazyass, and restauranting takes a heckuva lotta energy.  Other than that, I also tend to doubt my own capabilities.  Take risotto, for instance:  I’ve never made it and was uncertain if I could prepare it successfully.

Since I’m working until 9 p.m. tonight, I decided to fix a big lunch for the Pumpkin and myself.  I need hot food at least once a day, otherwise I feel malnourished and deprived.  Even if I’m doing nothing more than munching on appetizers all day long (i.e., at a Super Bowl party or other festive gathering), I NEED at least one of those appetizers to be a hot dish.   A hot meal for lunch would be very satisfying, so I marinated some boneless pork chops in a mesquite-lime marinade (thank you, SuperTarget!), sliced some Roma tomatoes–and then I got daring and decided to fix risotto.

I dragged out my trusty “Joy of Cooking” and propped that beast open on the counter, set about sautéing onion and parsley in olive oil and butter, and went from there.  You can look up risotto on your own to see exactly what I did, and in the process I learned a lot about cooking rice gradually in an uncovered pan.

I followed the recipe to the letter (except for the 1/2 cup of white wine at the beginning–we don’t HAVE any white wine, we’re Kool-Aid drinkers, and the current flavor is grape, which I didn’t think would work well with the onion and parsley) and learned that much of cooking risotto is being patient and adding the liquid slowly, waiting for the rice to absorb the stock (bouillon) cup by cup, as you diligently stir.

On the show, Chef Ramsey seems particularly incensed by sticky risotto, which is caused by overcooking.  The exact, correct state of done-ness has a narrow margin of error–take the rice off the heat too soon, and it’s watery and unsatisfying.  Let it simmer too long, and you end up with a glutinous mass that won’t ‘flow’ on the plate. I think the key to getting the risotto to the proper creaminess is to keep in mind that after you simmer the rice in chicken stock (or bouillon, in my house), you’ll be adding grated parmesan cheese to it as a finish, and the parmesan will soak up some of that liquid–so you have to stop simmering a little before you’d ordinarily WANT to do.

I ALMOST overcooked it–I’d gotten it to the point where it seemed perfectly creamy, mebbe just a touch too much so, and removed it from the burner.  Then I remembered the Parmesan, and had a bad couple of seconds while I stirred that in.  Thankfully, the Parmesan had just enough liquid to allow it to be incorporated and melt nicely without binding everything together like wallpaper paste.

Rick and I had a lovely lunch, and I’m feeling pretty pleased with my bad little self.  I can cook!