There’s a very important birthday coming up this week!  (Ok, technically there are a couple important birthdays coming up this week, but only one of them is relevant to my post today… As for the other, happy birthday to you too!!)

My little buddy is turning two!  And to celebrate I experimented with some homemade dog treats.

Ok, I’ll be honest.  I made these selfishly because I wanted to use up some ingredients in the refrigerator.  Specifically, I had more sweet potatoes than I knew what to do with, and I thought dog treats would be a good place to sneak them in and use them up.  I wasn’t interested in eating anything that healthy myself, so I tried to pawn it off on my dog.  It was pretty clear that a better birthday treat would have been a chunk of chicken, but he takes what he can get…

Everyone gets pretty excited about keeping their pet’s diet “grain-free” these days, but… these are mostly wheat flour.  They don’t appear to have ruined his life or his shiny coat yet.

One of the most useful things about making these treats is that I was able to use up some leftover ingredients (the sweet potatoes), and then I popped most of the dog treats in the freezer to use later.  If you leave them sitting at room temperature, they won’t last very long – maybe three days at best.  If you’ve got some frozen treats on hand though, life is good!

Now I always have something on hand if I need a treat, AND since my dog is a serious destroyer of toys, the fact that they’re a little extra hard coming out of the freezer isn’t such a bad thing.  He has to work a little harder to finish it off that way.  (I mean, probably no longer than two minutes, but that’s a good 115 seconds longer than the alternative.)

These sweet potato dog treats contain only three ingredients – one sweet potato, two eggs, and some whole wheat flour.  I had some leftover chicken stock too which I was hoping to find a home for in my dog treats, but after searching the internet, I couldn’t figure out if it was safe to include it.  Some websites told me that using pre-packaged chicken stock was bad for dogs because of the amount of sodium, so I panicked and didn’t include it.  (How bad can it be though?   I mean, I’m making him a grain-based dog treat.  Why not make it salty too?)  If you have any wisdom to share, please comment…

In any case, the recipe I followed is based on the one I found here, but with slight modifications.

Homemade Sweet Potato Dog Treats

• one fully cooked sweet potato
• 2 eggs
• 2 1/2 c. whole wheat flour

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mix all ingredients together until uniform, then turn onto a lightly floured surface.  Knead and mix in additional flour if required to keep the dough from being too sticky.  Press into a flat layer about 1/2 inch thick.  Cut into cookie shapes or strips, and place on a baking sheet.  Bake for 35-45 minutes or until firm/crisp.

Happy Birthday little guy!

xo – the llama