Classic Chicken and Rice Homemade Dog Food Recipe | Complete Nutrition

Hi friends! I'm Yulia and on this channel I help people to enhance their dog's lives. If that is something you're interested in, please subscribe. Helping me today is Viva. It's gonna be tasty! It's gonna be nice! Are you and your doggy new to cooking homemade dog food? Chicken and rice is a classic for a reason. It's easy to digest and is a great first introduction to homemade dog food. And for you it's also very easy to make. On top of that it's full of flavor that no dog will refuse. Let's go briefly over the ingredients. We have here chicken thighs, bone-in and skin-on. Bone-in part is very important. I will explain their significance in a minute. The second source of protein and so much more is chicken livers. I have 2.4 pounds here. Around 2 pounds is what you want to use for this recipe. Chicken liver is like a concentrated multi-vitamin supplement for your dog. It contains so much beneficial stuff. Iron, a bunch of other minerals, trace minerals, you name it. You don't need a ton. Just a couple of pounds is all you need for a 12-quart pot that I'm going to be using. It's that nutrient dense. Then we have one and a half cups of white rice or that is three quarters of a pound. When cooked it will amount to about two cups of cooked rice. I'm purposefully using white rice here and not the brown rice. It's questionable how well our dogs can digest brown rice. And even for people recently it came into question with arsenic and some other contaminants. So we're going to stick with plain white rice. If it's enriched that's great. If not that's also okay. And it should be easy for your dog to digest. Then we have three pounds of carrots. I will not be peeling these because carrot skin contains minerals, vitamins, beta-carotene, antioxidant. Just additional nutrition that is beneficial to our dogs. Also not having to peel them will cut down on our prep time. So it's a win-win. Spinach. I don't know why I felt like saying that right now. I will say just one thing about spinach. Recent studies have shown that adding spinach to dog's diets prolongs their lives. You can certainly use fresh spinach. I have frozen chopped spinach here. Other boxes that it came in. So two of these guys for my amount of food. Make sure that they have no sauce and it's just plain frozen spinach. I prefer these because they come already chopped for me and I can stack up and they're not going to wilt on me. And my Publix often has these on buy one get one. So they are a great deal. Tomatoes. Without going into much detail. Vitamin C, vitamin A and antioxidants. And pumpkin probably doesn't require much explanation either. Prebiotics, beta-carotene, vitamins. It's all right there. Let's jump straight to the recipe. I will also show you a sequence of steps that will help you save time. First thing, we are going to take our pieces of chicken, place them into our pot and cover them with water. We want to end up with a pot that is halfway full. By the way, I'm cooking for three German shepherds. If you have less dogs or smaller dogs, please feel free to half this recipe or even quarter it as it can only keep in refrigerator for up to four days. You can also freeze this food when it's ready and store it that way. I don't get a chance to freeze it. My dogs will eat this whole thing in three days. So we will place the chicken covered with water on the stove, light some fire underneath and move on to our carrots. We are going to wash our carrots with the scrubby side of the sponge. Don't use any soap, of course. And we will trim the ends. Then we are going to shred them. Yes, it's a bit of work, but shredding the carrots make all the nutrients more bioavailable for our dogs. And you're working your biceps too. So that's a second win-win for this recipe. This shredder, by the way, was given to me by a friend, Galina, who lives in Canada. That was, oh, some 12-15 years ago. That's how long I have not seen my friend. So sad. But I think of her every time I use it. Look at this. They look so good. This is healthy vision in a bowl right here. I love it. Oh, yeah. Also, while we are waiting for the chicken to heat up and start boiling, we will open all our cans. You can use two small cans of tomatoes and two small cans of pumpkin here. Or you can use one large one of each. We notice the time when the chicken starts to boil. Reduce the heat and let it cook for about 20 minutes. After 20 minutes have passed, we will add our chicken livers, carrots, and our rice. And make sure that everything is submerged in water. Let it heat back up to boiling point and let it cook for another 20 minutes. By the way, with your pumpkin, please make sure that what you have is a 100% pumpkin and not pumpkin pie filling. Because that stuff contains additional sugars and spices. And we would like to avoid that. My pot is pretty good at things not sticking to the bottom. But still, from time to time, I need to stir it and scrape the bottom to make sure that our rice doesn't stick to it. So, after 20 additional minutes of cooking, we are ready to get our chicken out of the pot. I will set it aside to cool off completely before removing meat off the bones. I don't know if you know this, but one of the first rules of cooking for our dogs is that we never feed our dogs cooked bones. They become brittle when they're cooked and they can hurt your dog's digestive tract. Raw bones is a different story. Now that we removed the chicken from our pot and set it aside to cool off, we are going to add our tomatoes, pumpkin and spinach to the pot and just bring it to boil. After that, the food is ready. The only thing left to do is to remove the meat off of the bones. I know what you're thinking. What a pain in the area. Why couldn't I just use some ground chicken for this? I'll tell you why we are doing this. The bone broth that we are ending up here with is so much more nutritionally dense. It has so much more power. It's packed with collagen and gelatin, which support joint health and great coat condition and digestion. And it has high levels of glucosamine and chondroitin, if I'm saying that right. They promote joint health as well. And on top of that, bone broth supports gut lining health, making it beneficial for dogs with sensitive stomachs or any digestive issues. Not to mention that it's packed with trace minerals and amino acids that also promote gut health and enhance immunity and overall well-being. So yes, please go through this trouble. The result is well, well worth it. And all we are going to need to do is to add the meat that we remove off the bones back into the food. And I know your dog is probably very impatient to try this food, but we need to wait until it cools off completely before feeding it. What is going on here? Oh, that's pumpkin. Yeah. Now, let's not forget, because we are removing the bones, we do need to add an additional source of calcium to our dog food. My preferred method of doing so is feeding my dog's raw chicken necks at the time of feeding. I simply substitute a quarter of the daily food amount for the bones. So if my dog is normally eating four pounds of homemade food, I will feed her three pounds of food that I have made and add one pound of chicken necks. That way she will get all the necessary calcium in her diet. Now, there are several benefits to feeding our dogs raw meaty bones. For example, it will keep their teeth clean, it will satisfy their natural desire to chew through something crunchy, and they help with emptying of the anal glands, to name a few. But if you don't or can't use raw bones with your dogs for any reason, a very easy solution is to add an all-natural source of calcium, such as this egg shell powder I have here. Just follow the directions on the packaging and mix it in slightly into your dog food at the feeding time. And as always, a quick price breakdown for you, which I think is especially important for this particular food, because this recipe can become your staple. You can add different things to it as you become more confident when cooking for your dogs, and you can create a lot of variety. But this is a great starting point, so let's see how much it will come to cost. The seven pounds of chicken thighs were $1.19 at our Aldi, and they came to $8.33. Chicken livers, 2.4 pounds, were $7.25. White rice, 3 quarters of a pound, was $0.50. 3 pounds of carrots, $2.18. Spinach, 20 ounces, $1.99. 28 ounces of canned pumpkin was $3.45. And 28 ounces of canned tomatoes was $1.49. And I will be using 9 pounds of chicken necks altogether to complete this pot of food. So, they were $1.89 a pound and came to $17. So, our total is $42.20. Now, if we divide $42 by 3 dogs and by 3 days, that takes us to $4.67. That is $4.67 per dog per day, or $140 per dog per month. What a great way to save money and feed your dog fresh and nutritious, healthy food at the same time. Ladies and gentlemen, I believe this is our third win-win for this recipe. Do you want to make this food even healthier? Here are my favorite additions at the time of feeding. First is fish oil gels. They are for omega-3s, and I add 1 gel per dog per day. Second is plain kefir or plain live yogurt. Those are for probiotics, and I add 1-3 tablespoons per dog per day. Third is turmeric for anti-oxidative powers. 1 teaspoon per dog per day for my guys. They weigh 60-70 pounds each. And a sunny-side-up egg for extra vitamins. 1 egg per dog per day. Now, I don't add all of these every day on the constant. I give maybe 1 or 2 of these additions a couple of times a week. We definitely don't want to overdo it and make the food too rich. And as I mentioned, all these amounts are for 60-70 pound German Shepherds. If your dog is smaller, of course, you should divide the amounts accordingly. Or ask away in the comments. I will help you out. And please, don't forget to hit that like button. Enjoy your dog, and please let me know if you have tried this recipe and what questions you have.