Tasty Tuesday: No-Bake Peanut butter Dog Treats

Here it is, my first Tasty Tuesday post!  I've been thinking and talking for awhile about how I'd like to try my hand at making treats for Elka.  It's easier to talk about things like that than actually get to it, as you well know, but finally, I've taken the plunge.

Originally, I was going to make a roll out and bake peanut butter biscuit recipe that a fellow blogger published last week; but, it's late Monday night (so, technically Tuesday morning) and after a long day at work, and then making the human dinner, I decided to wimp out and go with a no bake recipe, found here at eHow.com.

I halved the recipe, because, well, I love my dog, but there's only so long I want to stand hand mixing and shaping dog treats at 1 o'clock in the morning. Granted, I'm up at 1 o'clock in the morning anyway, regardless of whether I'm making dog tretas.  But I digress.

Elka was, shall we say, extremely interested by the goings-on in the kitchen.

The first step is to take, in my case, 1/4 cup milk and 1/2 cup peanut butter and put 'em in the mixing bowl.  It looked less than appetizing.  But was for the dog.

Next, you mix them until they're entirely combined.  This is one of those things that seems like it's never going to work, at first, and maybe you used too big a bowl or something, and then all of a sudden comes together.  Rather than a wooden spoon, I'm using a flat bamboo stir-fry thinger.  This is my go-to kitchen utensil, as I very much like the feel of it, and the spatula-esque nature of it means that you can scrape the sides of things and not waste ingredients.

Now, it's time for the oats.  Even halved, 1 1/2 cups of oats looks like a lot.  I didn't have rolled oats, and instead used instant.  If this was a human recipe, this might be a quality control issue.  I don't think Elka has those sorts of qualms.  She will, in fact, take a Milkbone and then drop it and leave it where it lies, but human food as dog treats?  Haven't had a problem yet.

Then you mix that until it all comes together and stays together.  This is a far more probably situation than the milk + peanut butter seems, and happened very quickly.

Then, you throw some waxed paper onto a cookie sheet, roll the stuff up into little balls, and plop 'em on there.  When done, put them in the refrigerator to firm up.  As you can see, I was actually rather dedicated to the notion of making the treats evenly spaced; that's the legacy of baking chocolate chip cookies and the like.  Here, though, there's no baking, and so no spreading, and so spacing doesn't really matter.  Size was a harder one for me; smaller treats would be bite sized, but bigger ones I could theoretically break up on the fly.  I couldn't decide, though the "dough" decided for me, after a fashion.  If you tried to make the balls too bit, they would not, in fact, cohesively ball up and some matter had to be removed for it to work.

The recipe, all in all, created no mess.  Several measuring cups got used, though I suppose I could've done it all with a single quarter cup measurer, in addition to utensils.  Elka helped with the cleanup, like a good girl.

I also gave her one formed but un-refrigerated treat that wouldn't fit onto the cookie sheet.  I couldn't throw off my spacing notions after all, I suppose.  She was certainly happy!