Sweet Potato Dog Treats

And now for my next trick... Dog treats!

You guys remember Stella, right? She's been on this blog before, a couple of times.

Now that we have a house, she can finally live with us! She's been staying with my parents, who love their little grand-dogger and were willing to keep her until Chris and I could have her with us. (Thanks, guys!)

And I've mentioned before that we got a new member of the family: Alby the Australian Cattle Dog-Border Collie mix. 6-ish months old, bundle of energy, super love-bug. He likes long walk on the beach (or anywhere), and chewing or licking or eating anything within his reach. Or anything out of his reach, safety tucked away in a hamper or trashcan. You know, all the places where people hide treats for puppies to find!

He was about five months old in that picture (and we have fattened him up some since. He was very skinny when he came to us). That's his favorite corner to curl up in while I'm in the kitchen, so he can keep me company.

Here are the kiddos together, hoping beyond desperate hope that I will share what I am preparing with them.

(At the time it was people cookies, so the answer was no.)

Today's recipe actually is for them, though.

My little miss Stella has itchy skin, and I read that sweet potato can help dogs with skin issues. So, I made homemade treats!

If any of y'all don't have dogs, I apologize. I have tested this on cats and confirmed they do not like them, so they really are just for dogs. But good news for y'all with dogs--the dogs loved them! Wolfed 'em and I think would eat them all day if allowed.

Granted that can be said about a lot of things, with my dogs. But they particularly seemed to like these.

Let's get down to it:

Prep time: ~5 minutes

Cook time: 1 hour

Ingredients:

5 very small sweet potatoes (or around 3-4 cups, chopped)
3/4 cup peanut butter
1/2 cup-3/4 cup oats
1 egg

Directions:

1. Peel, chop and boil your sweet potatoes until soft, about 25-30 minutes.

Once soft, drain and mash the heck out of them.

 

2. In a bowl, combine with egg.

And peanut butter.

And slowly add oats until you reach the desired consistency.

This should feel like cookie dough but a little firmer, since unlike cookie dough it will not harden too much during baking. You can add flour for a crunchier cookie, but I generally feed my dogs grain-free dog foods so I didn't want to add anything more than oats to these.

P.S., Hubby and I can both confirm that this batter smells exactly like peanut butter cookie dough. It was actually a little weird, to be honest.

3. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or tin foil. Since it's for doggies, no non-stick spray! Oil is not a necessary part of any doggie diet.

Roll them into 1/2 inch or smaller balls. (Prepare for sticky hands!)

They don't really spread out much so you can really pack them on there.

You can also form little bones if you like, or roll them out and cut them like Christmas cookies if you have a bone cookie cutter. The only bone cookie cutter I had was huge, so I just did this:

4 tiny balls of dough.

1 longer piece of dough rolled out between.

Squish 'em a little to keep them together.

And there you go. FYI though, only one of my little bones actually stuck together after baking.

4. Bake at 375 degrees F for ~35 minutes, until a little crispy. They will be a tad squishy, still.

Let cool, and let the dogs enjoy!

Here's Stella.

 

She takes it so daintily!

And little Mr. Alby.

Dogs are hard to photograph when they're wolfing stuff down out of your hand, so here's one of them waiting patiently and showing off their best "sit"s!

Stella will only gaze at you with this face, full of love and adoration, when she is sucking up because she wants something you have.

If you are curious, Hubby and I totally caved and tried them. They taste like bland, sugar-less peanut butter cookies. Not bad!

P.S., Doggie taste buds are different than ours, and they can't taste sweet the same way that we can--so don't add anything for sweetness! They don't need it. Anything that we would consider a sweetener is very likely to be bad for dogs, anyway.

Refrigerate after they're done. Enjoy! (Or shall I say, let your dogs enjoy!)

Breakfast Biscuits (And Happy New Year!)

Happy New Year! ...a little late! What did everyone do for New Years Eve?

I have a recipe for you! *Collective gasp* I had other posts I wanted to do (such as pictures of the house, or pictures of our "new" puppy), but I promised there'd be a recipe in the next post so I waited.

It was just a little longer than I expected! But we have internet now, a year and a half after we got married, so it should be a little easier now! Good news, too, is that I built up a little buffer of recipes in the meantime so I have at least a few guaranteed posts from here on.

Onto the recipe!

This is kind of my Egg and Sausage Biscuits, part 2. Everything has a sequel nowadays, right?

It's kind of more like a remake, I guess--new and improved! And much, much tastier.

I normally don't have ready-to-bake rolls in my house, since I pretty much only eat them at the holidays. Lo and behold, it was Thanksgiving day that I made these. The rolls of rolls were on sale for 99 cents each (which is just second to free) so I got three...then found out my parents were bringing rolls, too. We had extra! I decided to get creative, and sometimes creativity can be very, very tasty.

Did I mention they were tasty? Easy, too!

Let's get down to it:

Prep time: 5 minutes

Cook time: ~20 minutes

Serves: 8 biscuits

Ingredients:

8-count roll of crescent rolls (any brand)
2 eggs
2 MorningStar Maple Sausage Patties OR Original Sausage Patties

Directions:

1. Spray a small skillet with nonstick spray. Beat your eggs in a bowl and pour into the skillet over medium-low heat.

Scramble until mostly cooked, about 2-3 minutes.

Don't overcook them. They will be cooking again in the oven!

2. Follow the directions to microwave the sausage patties. Chop and add to the eggs.

3. Pop open your roll of crescent rolls. Does anybody else get paranoid if the roll doesn't open on the first try? When will it open? Is it broken? Will it be loud? When?!

Ahem.

Separate out a single roll.

Fold it and squish it until it forms a nice uniform ball, and no original seams are visible.

Flatten it out into a little pancake.

Grab a tablespoon of the egg mix.

And stuff it into the pancake you've made.

Pinch the edges shut over the mixture, careful to smooth out any weak spots. I discovered that rolling it again helped a bit.

Rinse and repeat for the other 7 rolls. You may have a little extra filling left over, but I didn't mind. (and neither did Hubby, as he was sampling it.)

4. Line up the finished rolls on a sprayed cookie sheet.

(See that one I didn't close up well enough? It will pop open while cooking. Oops!)

Bake according to the directions on the crescent roll container until the rolls are crispy and a little browned. If they look underdone, just add a couple of minutes!

Here's that one I didn't seal properly post-baking. It still tasted good!

Here's a cross-section of one of the ones that did stay closed.

They were so good. Mmm. Now I kind of want them for lunch.

Enjoy!

Confession Time

Happy Friday, everyone! Be forewarned: This is a rambling, personal post.

I have a confession to make.

Before I started this blog, I thought to myself: I am doing this for me, I am doing this for fun, and if it never goes anywhere that needs to be okay with me. I made that deal with myself before the first post ever went up, because sometimes things work, and sometimes they don't. Unless you have tons of followers and page views, it is also almost impossible to make money off of a blog, so I knew I couldn't do it for that reason, either.

I loved it when people commented on the recipes on Facebook (and sometimes on the actual blog), and it tickled me silly when people actually wrote and told me they made one of the recipes. (I even got to try my friend Lisa's version of my guacamole at a party!)

But, somewhere along the way, my expectations got too high--for the blog, and even for me. I can get very anxious about things sometimes, silly things more often than not, and the blog started to become one of those things. I was anxious about what to make, whether it was new enough or if I should be more inventive. I was anxious that I didn't post enough, or did I post too much? I was anxious if there weren't as many comments--did that mean it was a bad recipe?

Rather than be inspired by the desire to do well and do better, it kind of paralyzed me and I noticed myself blogging less and less often until finally I went on hiatus.

I told myself once we got the house, things would be better. I would have more space, feel more motivated, etc., etc.

Unfortunately, I was still just as anxious about everything, just with more space to do it.

I realized somewhere along the way I lost my joy for cooking because I was too worried about how people would receive it. I was discouraged when there wasn't much feedback.

I became that person with a First World Problem with my blog. Boo hoo.

I actually told Hubby the other day I was thinking about shutting down the blog, because even though I am now back from Hiatus, it has still been almost six months since a recipe has gone up on here, and over two weeks since the last non-recipe post. My high expectations for myself said that's just not okay.

Hubby, Mrs. Webb-expert that he is, asked the question I didn't really want him to ask: Was I going to stop writing because I was discouraged, or because I actually didn't want to do it anymore?

Of course the answer was that I was discouraged. I was caving to an imagined pressure that just wasn't there, and I knew it. It was a pressure entirely of my own making.

I set out in this venture for myself, because it is something I had wanted to do for a while. I love cooking, I love sharing my vegetarian recipes with the world, and opening the eyes of even just one or two people that food without meat doesn't have to be boring or tasteless.

It was only ever supposed to be fun, and my own expectations skewed that.

So, hoping to conjure some feeling other than discouragement, I went back through my own archives... and found myself remembering how good all of those recipes tasted, how silly I felt with some of the mistakes I made in the recipes and posted anyway. And I found myself writing a new post for a new day, and feeling hopeful about it all over again.

All of this to say, I'm here to stay--at least for a little while longer. And if any of you have small-time ventures like this, I hope you remember why you started. If it wasn't for fame and fortune, don't put too much pressure on yourself. At the end of the day, it will just take the fun out of life.

See you next time! And I promise... Next time will actually bring a recipe.

The Big Reveal!

So, the moment of truth--the big reveal:

Hubby and I bought a house! :D

It will make doing this blog easier because:

-We will actually be getting internet (like we live in the 21st century or something), so I don't have to scramble to do the posts on my lunch break.

-We will live closer to the grocery stores that have everything we vegetarians need--one is only a mile away! Our local small-town grocery store didn't even know what falafel was! And of course no vegetable bouillon cubes were to be found.

And!

-It means a brand-spankin' new lovely kitchen of our own!

With real counter space so the days of cutting boards on the washing machine are over!

With a dishwasher so the days of washing all of our dishes by hand are over!

Lots of cupboards so the days of not having enough space are over!

Lots and lots of drawers so the days of having one drawer for the entire kitchen (that's right, folks, one) are over!

And of course loads of other fun stuff that comes with a new house, like a deck, a yard, being able to have pets, having more than one bedroom, having more than one bathroom, etc., etc., etc.! But for the purposes of a food blog, the kitchen's the main thing, eh?

Once we're more settled in, I'll put up a few pictures--and recipes will start back up like normal. It's a little hard to cook right now, what with the majority of our belongings in boxes.

Check back soon for more!

Announcement--4th and final hint!

Here is is, the final hint from the announcement mentioned last week! Hint #4 : We have given our landlords our 30-day notice!

That pretty much spells it out for y'all, but I will do a full announcement next week!

All the hints so far:

-Will make this blog easier
-Involves a kitchen
-Does not involve our current kitchen
-Involved giving our landlords notice
-Not babies

See you next time for the official reveal!

Announcement--Hint # 3!

The list of people who know the answer to this is getting longer all the while...

I confirmed with another person that she was right after Hint #2: my grandma Sue! I broke my neither-confirm-nor-deny rule again because, well, Grandma privileges. (Should I make a list of all the special perks around here? I feel like I should...) She guessed privately, too, so the cat's still not out of the bag!

The third hint for the announcement from last week is this: The kitchen mentioned in Hint # 2 is not our current kitchen.

Hmmm. :)

What we now know:

-Will make this blog easier
-Involves a kitchen
-Does not involve our current kitchen
-Not babies

Stick with us, almost time for the announcement!

There is only one more hint after this, and then the big reveal!

But--the next hint will pretty much spell it out for you, if you didn't get it from this hint. Stay tuned!

Announcement--Hint # 2

Another beautiful and rainy autumn day! And time for Hint #2. Getting close to the announcement!

Last time we got Hint #1, and my friend Lauren guessed it from that! She was pretty confident she knew what it was, so she just texted me rather than out the surprise. I know I said I wouldn't confirm or deny, but she was my maid of honor so she gets special perks.

Now here's Hint # 2: It involves a kitchen!

That's a little bit more of a hint than the last time, right?

Now we know:

-Doing this blog will be easier

-Somehow related to a kitchen

-Not babies

There will probably only be one or two more hints after this--and then it will be time to spill!

Keep guessing, y'all!