Tuesday, September 27, 2011

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!




9 comments:

  1. Hi Y'all,

    Love your dog. Have a friend with a pair of velcro Dobs.

    Thanks for followin'. Followed you back.

    Y'all come back now,
    BrownDog's Human

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  2. Woof! Woof! Happy Tasty Tuesday! Oh I do LOVE PB, my favorite. Have an enjoyable Tasty Tuesday and Golden Thanks for joining the HOP. Lots of Golden Woofs, Sugar

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  3. @Hawk Thanks very much for coming by! Strangely, I had a dream last night that somebody gave me their Chessie, just on the street. It was very weird. He was a cool dog, though! ;)

    @Sugar Elka loves peanut butter, and is very excited by the presence of these treats. The fridge kind of smells like peanut butter now from the "firming" stage, so she definitely comes running every time that door opens! Glad to join the HOP, it's fun!

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  4. These look great! Clancy LOVES peanut butter, so I know he would be thrilled with these. I'm just getting in to learning how to make treats for my pets as I want to find healthy goodies for them, so this is perfect. I'm definitely going to try these, thanks for sharing.

    Love the pic of Elka watching what was going on in the kitchen. :D

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  5. First off, I love the way you wrote up your recipe. You bake like me. Slap it in a bowl, mix it with this thing...holy crap did I screw this up?...nope, it worked! YAY!!those look easy and yummy! I'm glad you decided to make them!!

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  6. Those sound yummy!

    Thanks for stopping by! We are now following you and hope you will follow us too!

    Kari
    http://dogisgodinreverse.com

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  7. @Karl I think I'm following you already! I'll double-check, for sure. Try out the treats ;)

    @Julie I think it must be Dog Law that peanut butter is a favorite! Elka is definitely my kitchen buddy. She wants to know about every piece of food that gets moved in this house.

    @Kolchak Thanks very much! I'm glad I made them too; you can imagine that Elka is thrilled. I've read a lot of cooking blogs, so I know the setup that I like seeing, I just kind of mimicked that, with my own personal flair added.

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  8. These look easy and yummy but Frankie is a weird dog, he doesn't like peanut butter! Beryl does but it isn't a favourite treat. I could give them a go though and if they don't eat them I could:)

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  9. Doesn't like peanut butter?! How odd. Maybe Tahini would work? Trying to think of a thick enough, still dog-friendly replacement. Nutella would work well for humans, but not dogs!

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