I used to make fun of people who froze a lot of meat and called it “preps.” But in my case these are just luxuries, to keep me from going insane with depression if I’m stuck through the winter with nothing but six buckets of beans and rice.
Actually I’m a lot more likely to be stuck at the cabin during Monsoon than winter, and Monsoon doesn’t worry me at all. So go figure: I got burned, and now Winter is the time for prepping like it’s 1999. On a more practical note, paying gigs drop off to nothing during the winter and I tend to burn a lot more propane, which costs money. So stocking up on meat isn’t just feeding my neurosis. Last winter Landlady brought me a whole bunch of pork, and I assure you it all got eaten.
Anyway I got paid last week for a paying gig, and for once it wasn’t all instantly spent on building materials. So I brought home some more cheap cuts of chicken to squirrel away in Ian’s freezer. I’ve been doing this every chance I got, when I had a few extra bucks and the market’s meat reefer wasn’t broken.
Also a big package of “smoked sausage,” which is more like slightly spicier than usual hot dogs. It’s good to store some snack food, rather than nothing but ingredients.
And today, before Ghost goes home, we feast on hot chicken!
Before somebody says it, no. They don’t get the bones.
Chicken bones are ok if you feed them to the dog raw. It’s the cooking that makes them brittle and prone to nasty splinters. Beef bones are also better for dogs when raw.
Cheers
…or, most bones are fine for dogs if they are cooked long and on low heat to make them fairly soft. Doesn’t work with large pork bones. I give my dogs everything else but those and the long leg and wing bones from chicken. I just don’t trust those, raw or otherwise. But if you stew them long enough so they bend, rather than break, they’d probably be safe.
The broth from those stewed bones makes a terrific and nutritional addition to soups and stews of all kinds. I even use it to cook fresh (or frozen) vegetables.
Hi Mama,
Tom Lonsdale’s book “Work Wonders: Feed Your Dog Raw Meaty Bones” made a convert out of me. It came up a few years ago in comments on one of my brother’s blog posts (www.fathead-movie.com). Hit me as ironic that lots of folks (like me) go all paleo/primal/ancestral, but don’t consider that our dogs are even worse off eating all of the grains and crap in standard kibble rations. Then we wonder why dogs now get diabetes, cancer, and other diseases!
Cheers
Jerry, I’ve had dogs all my life, even raised AKC Black Labradors for a long time. My dogs have always been given as much meat (milk and eggs too) as possible, as much of it raw as I could manage. Used to buy raw bones from the local butcher each week. We raised chickens, so had plenty of eggs and butchering waste from them – as well as milk from the dairy goat herd.
I don’t feed my dogs anything with soy in it, but a little other grain doesn’t harm them as long as they get the animal protein they need first. My last two personal pet dogs lived for 19 years each, and never had any disease problems.
knew a lady who coked chicken backs [cheap!] all day and fed them to her irish setters. softened the bones to edibility.
Jerry, the notion that dogs need a meat-intensive diet for health is mostly myth. Wolves do, dogs don’t. The principal physiological difference between wolves and dogs is that dogs can metabolize carbohydrates, and happily live on anything humans eat – with rare exceptions like chocolate.
Domestic dogs get exotic (for dogs) diseases because, living with us, they live long enough to do so. A feral dog seldom survives its first injury.
Very true, Joel. Cats are the only obligate carnivores, actually. 🙂
Didn’t mean to start a debate. The “Raw Meaty Bones” reference was intended to focus more on the raw bone part, not he meat. The vet who wrote it emphasizes that offal and some veggies are important parts of the dog diet. Wild canines pick these up primarily through eating entrails, so they’re not straight meat eaters either. Dogs can indeed metabolize carbs (not grains tho), but, like us humans, don’t need them and suffer, like us humans, from a modern diet overloaded with them.
Cheers