a recipe for pets & peanut butter

So, I must tell you I received a new camera for Christmas... and I've been having quite a bit of fun trying it out on just about everything... it's a DSLR Nikon D3200... and can do so much more than my little old point and shoot Nikon!

But today is all about our dogs.  We have three dogs here at Red Gate Farm, two labs and a miniature dachshund.  The yellow lab is Cady, she will be 9 years old in May.  The black lab is Kasia and she just turned 8 in December.  You can see who really runs Red Gate Farm, hmmm.

Then there's Molly, our miniature dachshund.  She will be 17 years old at the end of January.  She doesn't really like to have her picture taken or hang out in the kitchen but since I was baking something she couldn't resist, linoleum floors and all.

And what was the recipe?  Well homemade Peanut Butter Dog Biscuits!  We've been buying little biscuits for our dogs in bulk from our local farm and garden store for years but back in November or December I saw an episode of Giada's show on the Food Network and she was making little dog biscuits for gifts for the holidays... they were so easy I thought I'd give them a try myself, sans the fancy dog bone shaped cookie cutter that is.

I looked up the recipe online and read the reviews... one of the reviews was against using the store bought chicken broth since most include onions.  Knowing onions are a no-no for dogs I looked for other recipes that didn't include the broth since the only broth/stock I had DID include onions.  I found a similar recipe (can't find it again for the source) and decided to merge the two recipes... this is what I came up with.

Red Gate Farm Peanut Butter Dog Biscuits

2 cups whole wheat flour (I used whole wheat pastry flour since that is what I had)

1 cup oats

1 tablespoon baking soda

1 cup creamy peanut butter

1 1/2 cups boiling water

First I mixed the dry ingredients together, then added the peanut butter and slowly added the boiling water mixing well with a spoon.  At the point most of the ingredients were incorporated I switched to my hands and mixed the dough well.

The dough is fairly dry and not very sticky.  I took about 1/3 of the dough at a time and using my hands patted out a rectangle shape about 1/2 inch thick.  I didn't need any flour to pat out the dough but you might want to keep some on hand, just in case.

With my trusty pizza cutter I cut the dough into little squares, trying to keep most the same size for even baking.  You could use a fancy cutter at this stage, especially for gift giving.

Since I was all out of parchment paper, I lined my cookie sheets (it took two) with foil for baking.

I baked these at 350 degrees for about 25 minutes.  The second recipe recommended turning off the oven at this point and leaving them in the oven over night to dry.  This worked really well as the biscuits were much drier by morning but still had a slight softness to the middle.  You could play with this a bit to get them just how YOU like them.  We keep our dog biscuits in a vintage (of course) tin with a tight lid... both recipes recommend this for storage and varied in keeping them for 1 to 2 weeks.

With my 3 pups, well they'll be lucky to last that long!

The dogs loved these homemade treats and they were so cheap and easy I will definitely make them again.

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Elizabeth & Co

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