Dog Biscuits

I prefer to call them cookies. My dog loves them. There is the never-ending quest to find a new variety that she’ll go crazy for. When Eva was a puppy, I would give her little tiny dog biscuits, suitable to her size. I bought one of those industrial sized bags and by the time she finished it, she wasn’t tiny anymore. As a result, she likes her cookies small. It’s rather amusing to see her reaction when I hand her a full size large dog-sized cookie. She gives me this look, “you really expect me to eat all this?” Sometimes she drops it on the ground to have a look at just how huge it is, then she picks it up and trots off to a private space in the yard so she can eat it unobserved. I’m thinking maybe she doesn’t like to be sloppy and drop crumbs when there are people watching. You can take the same giant sized cookie, break it into pieces and she’ll happily stand there and take each piece from your hand until it’s gone. Since she is a rather large dog (24 ½ inches at the shoulder, 80 or so pounds) people who give out cookies to dogs always give her the biggest one they have. When a stranger hands her a cookie like that, she just drops it on the ground, then looks up as if to say, ”You got anything smaller?” Eva loves to go to town with me, and we’ve figured out all the stores where dogs are welcome. Most of those also hand out cookies! There’s the feed store, of course, and the local Ace hardware, the tire place, and a few small businesses downtown that welcome dogs.

But I digress. The original point of this was to talk about making dog cookies. Rene asked if I could make dog cookies. I said, “Never have, but I’m willing to try. Why?” Turns out, Rene wants to have a doggy café out in front of the coffeehouse this summer. Sounds like fun! So now, I have been busily baking dog cookies, testing recipes, testing flavors on every dog I meet, until I have finally established my basic dog cookie recipe. Being the tinkerer I am, I couldn’t leave well enough alone when presented with a recipe, I had to modify it, and then modify it again. Ultimately, I have my very own dog cookie recipes. Eva loves them! Of all the dogs I have given them to I have only heard of one that even hesitated before eating them. Most people tell me they don’t think the dog could possibly have tasted anything. They disappeared so fast! So now the task at hand is to determine how to package them and a price. I’ve almost got those details worked out, and a good thing, too, because summer is almost here!

Now, if I could just get my silly word processor to talk to my printer…(but that’s another story…)

Dog gourmets on Whidbey Island.