Here's what I have so far, with costs:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pBAA01BTvGGJLmq2j46zJSg

These are with prices that I got today from Costco. I do have prices for some things in there, but as you can see, they are not used in the recipe. The only meat in use is chicken. Total cost.... 90 cents a pound. This comes out WAY cheaper than feeding Orijen Large Puppy kibble and some commercial raw. At my pup's current size (30 lbs), that's $1.35 a day for food.

Also note that the eggs were calculated assuming each egg weighs 57 grams.

My plan is to puree veggies and fruits, then run all of it through my buddy's commercial grinder and mixer.

Do these amounts look right? Should I consider adding anything else?

You have no organ meat in there like Liver or kidney this is something I would add for sure. I choose not to feed pork so if it was me I would scrap the pork ribs and add whole turkey. Fish oil (salmon oil) and Vit E also is important in my opinion. I do not feed dairy food like cottage cheese so I would scrap that as well.

So your numbers represent a 10# batch, good for almost a week's meals? Looks pretty good to me. Here's just a couple comments based on my own loose "plan":

I stay away from broccoli and other cruciferous veggies as well as the nightshade family, which you don't have anyway. I try to make dark leafy greens about half of the glop (by eyeballing it) - misc. greens, chard, spinach, carrot tops, etc. - and then add squash, green beans, a little sweet potato, and basically anything else available at the moment. Whenever I've fed raw carrots, they seem to pass through intact, so I'll run them through a processor to grind them real fine or cook/microwave them, or just skip 'em. I used to feed occasional cottage cheese, but I don't see that there's any real value to it. I do feed a ton of yogurt for allergy reasons.

Poultry is the majority of what I feed (at supermarket sale prices - even cheaper than Costco), with some fish and beef for variety. I just started doing my own grinding a couple months ago and, although tempted to run the whole chicken through, I've now started feeding the back, neck, wings whole and grinding the rest. Feeding everything ground wasn't keeping her teeth as clean as they used to be. Also, I do salmon oil and E rather than flax or something else.

JMO

BTW, nice spreadsheet! Haven't seen Google Docs before. Hmm, gives me lots of ideas.

Mike

 Quote: Jason Sidener

You have no organ meat in there like Liver or kidney this is something I would add for sure. I choose not to feed pork so if it was me I would scrap the pork ribs and add whole turkey. Fish oil (salmon oil) and Vit E also is important in my opinion. I do not feed dairy food like cottage cheese so I would scrap that as well.

Yes, and yogurt is a FAR better choice for dogs than cottage cheese, which is loaded with salt (check out the package; I'll bet you will be surprised) and is not fermented. Dogs in general react much better to fermented milk products than to straight milk stuff. And plain no-sugar yogurt provides probiotics.

Have you checked out the LB sample menus?

 Quote:

And plain no-sugar yogurt provides probiotics.

What is your suggestion on amount and frequency for yogurt Connie?

Like Mike Armsrong, I too give a lot of plain (not vanilla and not fruit ... must be plain) yogurt with live (might say "live" and might say "active") cultures.

Mike read a book about probiotics last year and recommended it to me, and I was very impressed with it, too, even though it's addressed mainly to humans.

I don't say "give yogurt" casually any more, though, because I have been dismayed to see that many people thought that if they couldn't find plain, then fruit or vanilla was the next best thing.

It's not. Those are loaded with sugar, and I would rather give no yogurt than to give a dessert-type food to my dogs every day.

Also, supermarket yogurt that's heat-treated after fermenting and has no live cultures is likewise not really of value, IMO.

So I look for the brands with the largest number and the most types of "bugs" in them and I buy them by the quart. Turns out that they are no more expensive that way, even in a natural foods store, that the sugary dessert cups of yogurt.

So, now that I have given an encyclopedia-worthy disclaimer, I will say that I now give a big plop every day. I would guess that I give 1/2 cup to the big dog and 1/4 cup to the small ones.

I am using it as part of an allergy regimen (like Mike), so others might like to give less.

I would not give any to a dog who didn't tolerate it well, of course, but I have not run into that yet. Yogurt is very different from milk.

I have a friend who gives goat yogurt because her dog had a little diarrhea with cow yogurt, but that's as close as I've come to seeing a problem with it.

All JMO. Probiotics is a rapidly-evolving field, but so far that's what I have been doing.

Thanks Connie!!!!

P.S. If I had a puppy, I would definitely give yogurt. There are several studies that seem clear to me that the more exposure to good gut bugs in a developing immune system, the better, for life.

Again, just my take on a fairly new area of interest.

Sorry, I should have mentioned that I was going to add yogurt or kefir. Costco didn't have any kefir, and they didn't have plain bulk yogurt, only flavored.

So do the amounts on the veggies look ok?

Also, as for the organs, the whole chickens come with them. Do I need to add more?

The whole supermarket chickens I buy come with an organ pack stuffed inside, but the contents of the pack vary greatly from chicken to chicken. I've found packs that have no liver, no neck, four hearts... It's like the packers are just grabbing a handful of guts off a big table and slapping them into a paper sleeve. In any case, I'm interested in the answer you get to your question about chicken organ meat.