Chicken (whatever is on sale; sometimes chicken thighs, sometimes whole chickens - but be very sure the meat doesn't contain any bones or slivers), garbanzo beans, carrots, and sweet potatoes. Also, we cook rice separately for the big mixture.
We use garlic, but some people say garlic is not good for dogs. We quit using Frontline on our dogs about four years ago after having a flea infestation in the house - despite the Frontline - and began using garlic in our dogs' food. Very rarely have the dogs had ticks or fleas on them. But I do not recommend garlic to anyone; do your own research and make your own decision on it b/c, like I said, there are some websites which emphatically say don't give your dogs garlic.
We used three packages of chicken thighs on this particular day, two medium sweet potatoes and about three carrots.
Place the sweet potatoes, carrots, garlic in the roasting pan. Top with the chicken. Cover with aluminum foil and place in a preheated 250 degree oven for 1 hour and 40 minutes. I think the temperature and timing is not an exact science. I have used the crockpot in the past; you just want to cook the chicken and in the amount of time it takes to cook the chicken, the vegetables will cook through as well.
After 1 hour and 40 minutes, uncover and dump in your garbanzo beans. Leave uncovered and put back in the oven for about another 20 minutes.
After about 20 minutes, remove from the oven and let cool a bit. Now's the time to get yourself a nice cold beverage. Remove the chicken and chop.
If you've chosen to put garlic in your dog's food, remove the chicken and then squish up the cooked garlic pieces to mush.
My cat doesn't like this mixture so we put some cooked chicken in a separate container for him. We use this as his "before dinner snack". We give him dry cat food because, other than the chicken, he won't eat anything else (although we do give him a spoonful of low-fat cottage cheese with his meals).
Dump the sweet potatoes, carrots and mushed garlic into the bowl which has the chopped, cooked chicken and rice. Mix it all up.
Then we spoon the mixture into containers and store in the fridge for the upcoming week.
I looked online and found this website, Dino-Vite, and purchased some of their items (LickOchops and DinoVite squeeze packet supplements). Although they say some dogs are finicky and may not like the supplements, our dogs never had a problem with them - although the one supplement smells a bit like seaweed/fish tank.
There are a lot of homemade dog food recipes available on the internet. I recommend you do some research and figure out what's best for you, but this is what we've been using for a couple years and it seems to work well for us and our pets.
