There’s been some funk with the old software we were using for our blogs, so we’re switching it up and trying WordPress. This is my inaugural entry with the new technology, and I am dying to try uploading a picture.

Or, “why the dogs are about to eat better than we are”.

Last time I wrote, it was because my little friend Ron was having a few health problems, and part of my attempt to help her get better involved vast amounts of sweet potato. While she was on the sweet potato like a fat kid on a Smartie, she also started to eat her regular food again, so I took my saucepan and backed off.

Now? She’d better hang onto her little red collar, because there are big changes a-coming. Her progress has been really slow – she’s been getting slightly better, and she takes these crazy antioxidants every day, but
she’s still pretty skinny and not her usual perky self. So I decided to do some research, and discovered that some people feed their dogs all- natural diets to help their livers heal. In most cases, diet is the only
option for controlling liver disease.

It doesn’t seem like a big stretch to me. I mean, sure, it’s more effort, but can you imagine choking down three bowls of kibble every day for ten years? No wonder their little systems give out. It all seems so processed and wrong – and if processed stuff is wrong for US, why do we think it’s any better for them?

I put a call in to our vet, about whom I cannot say enough nice things, and she left me a message this morning that said “absolutely, let’s try it”. So we’ll see what happens when I talk to her tonight. I see a future full of broccoli, mashed potato, and milk thistle for my little brown friend. I just hope it works!

(And who knows? Maybe I’ll become a better cook in the process.)

I just finished this truly enjoyable book, Julie and Julia, about this
woman, Julie Powell, who takes a year to cook all the recipes in Julia
Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. When the project started,
Julie wouldn’t even eat an egg, but by the time it finished she had not
only eaten an egg, she had made marrow sauce, cooked brains, and
chopped a lobster into pieces while it was still alive.

I don’t know precisely what this has to do with becoming a dog person,
but the whole time I was reading it I made sweet potato after sweet
potato, boiled down vegetable stock (sans onions, because onions will kill
a dog) and cut the centers out of slices of oranges to try to get one of
our Dalmatians, Ron, to gobble up a twice-a-day dose of antibiotic. The
entire time I was reading about Julie’s adventure with Beef Bourgignon
and Charlottes Malakoff, mayonnaise and hollandaise, I was also trying
desperately to get our poor hound to eat. And if that meant mashed
sweet potato, then so be it.

Five years ago, I never would have seen myself living in the same house
with a dog, let alone feeling concern over what this dog would eat. I
mean, they eat anything, don’t they? Sure they do. But it occurred to me
the other week that Ron and I have occupied the same universe for over
half her life, and she, with her small black friend Len, have become as
integral a part of my day as Mike kissing me goodbye and the sun coming
up.

Ron follows me around while I cook dinner – relentlessly. She lies down in
the kitchen doorway and watches me, just in case the Roast Fairy really
does come along and drop a premium cut right in front of her nose. I
don’t have the heart to break it to her just yet that a) she lives with
mostly-vegetarians, and I have never cooked a roast, and b) her recent
bout of canine heptatis probably doesn’t allow for a beefy nirvana
anytime soon.

Her buddy Len is much more circumspect about the whole thing. She
ventures forth every once in a while to sniff out the prospects, but one
false move and she heads for the hills, baby carrot or no. It has been
interesting to see her beef up a little in the weeks that Ron had a limited
appetite. She’d saunter into the kitchen and order two of everything,
gobble it down in a flash, and be back for more.

The first day Ron ate her entire bowl of chow, slathered in sweet potato,
I felt as if I’d served my specialty to the toughest food critic in town. She
ate every scrap, and I couldn’t have been happier. I’m not the best cook,
but I like doing it, and I guess we all have to start somewhere.
Unfortunately, I have to start with the canine contingent.

Now that Ron is bouncing back a little (we think), the sweet potato isn’t
quite so necessary, and the natural order of things has been somewhat
restored. Tonight she lingered at my feet as I made eggs and hashbrowns
(no Choux a la Mornay in this house, thanks), anxiously awaiting the
moment when a piece of potato would fall to the floor, hers for the
taking. She watched every scrape of the spatula with wide, intent brown
eyes. I am pretty sure that had something dropped, she’d have caught it
midair.

For Ron, at least, I’m as good a cook as Julia Child. Then again, she’s
been known to eat dead leaves out of the flower beds, lumps of dirt from
under the lawn, and once, an old piece of pita bread she found in the
driveway.

Getting her to eat is a small victory, but I’ll take it.