On Cooking and Dogs...

I love to cook.  My dogs love to eat. One of their favorite treats is potato peels!  Yep, potato peels.  However, they eat raw broccoli, carrots, lettuce and pretty much anything I would put in my own mouth – and lots of stuff I would not.  There are two labs who are simply walking stomachs and the other two are mutts who have learned to eat like labs FROM the labs.  It pretty much makes my garbage disposal obsolete which is of course good for my septic tank.  It also keeps my dogs trim and happy.  I don’t have to feed them fat-filled doggy treats to make them feel pampered.  A large Milk Bone biscuit is akin to a doggy Snicker’s bar. I won’t even go into the fat content of a pig’s ear.

So we were a happy bunch.  But this four-legged half of the Brady Bunch melded with the “here’s a story of a MAN named Jon” and is own four legged buddy Scupper.  Scupper is a culinary snob.  He turns his nose up at anything that is not MEAT, although he has an affinity for Cool Whip…don’t try to figure that one out.  Scupper would more often than not refuse to eat his own dog food.  Jon plied it with all the commercial “get your dog to eat anything” products – gravies, meat bits, canned tuna, you name it.  But Scupper ate on his own schedule and what he ate yesterday might not be on his list of “will eat” today.

Before I moved in with Jon and Scupper, I came and stayed and when I stayed I cooked.  Jon is an adventuresome and gratitude-filled eater.  He loved the idea of my cooking and it was something that I was pleased to be able to offer.  I can whip up just about anything from what’s in the cupboard…even a bachelor’s cupboard.  So I came; I stayed and I cooked.  At the time we had not introduced our brood.

What I never realized when I was cooking at home is that I never had to worry if I dropped bits of food on the floor.  In my house it was gone the moment it touched the floor.  My dogs have never heard of the three-second rule – nothing ever lasted that long anyway.  Although dog tracks and fuzz balls were a part of my life – food on the floor never was.  With Scupper as my new cooking attendant all that had changed.  He would sniff at tid-bits on the floor….maybe. I realized that now cooking was a lot more work!  I actually had to be careful and I had to clean up after myself, the travesty!

Fortunately, it was not long before love truly blossomed and we realized that introductions must be made and hierarchies established and accepted.  We all live together in a relatively harmonies balance. For the most part it all went well.  I am now back to my old style of cooking.  The kitchen floor has the dog prints, the hair and the scuff marks…but by God there is no food on it!  And even Scupper has decided he might even like broccoli!