Homemade dog treats

Lucy’s three years old. It seems like just yesterday we were bringing her home from her foster family into our little casa. To celebrate one of our fur monster’s birthdays this week, we decided to pull out our aprons and bake her something special. Yes, we are those people. But we make up for it by not buying her sweaters.

Honestly, who is ever really going to know if homemade, or even gourmet, doggie treats are any good? Our taste testers are pretty easy to please – so we just went straight into our pantry to see what we could toss together into a bowl and bake up, doggie style. Heck, these could even be human treats.

Here’s what we tried out, with apparent success.

• 1 cup of wheat flour

• ½ cup of peanut butter

• 2 packets of instant maple and brown sugar oatmeal

• a little bit of hot water to bind it all together

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees and coat a cookie sheet with non-stick cooking spray. Mix all of the above ingredients and roll it into small bite sized portions. Remember you are making treats for your pup and not yourself, so consider the size of your cookies when rolling the dough. You can, of course, also roll the dough out and use a cookie cutter to make fun shapes like dog bones or fire hydrants. The only cookie cutter we have is a ghost, and Lucy wasn’t feeling ghoulish for her big 0-3, so we passed.

After rolling the dough into small balls, place them on your baking sheet and brush them with a light egg wash (one egg mixed with some water). This only makes them a little shinier and prettier for your pup and can be completely skipped if you choose.

Bake them for about ten minutes, watching them pretty carefully to make sure they don’t burn since they are so small. Make sure they have plenty of time to cool before serving to your pup. Ours found them to be yummo.

Feliz cumpleanos Lucy!