A change in our routine
Hello readers! If you’ve been following our journey you have already been introduced to the fifth member of our family, our little chihuahua, Porscha. Michael had Porscha before we started dating so while I haven’t loved her as long, I don’t love her any less. She is truly a part of our family and we love watching the boys grow up with her. Well, what most of you may not know is that Porscha has kidney disease. We’ve known about this for several years now and we had a recent report that showed absolutely no trace of kidney disease, all of her labs came back 100% normal, praise the Lord. After finding out that she had kidney issues, we had to put her on a special kidney diet that included prescription food and adding a supplement called Epakitin to her food. Before her diagnosis, we would feed her a lot of table food with some dog food sprinkled in. We recently started looking for other food options for her as the prescription food had a lot of preservatives and was a bit pricey.
A better alternative
We came across some veterinary-approved, homemade, kidney-safe recipes for her dog food. This article has some great advice about her diagnosis as well. We got clearance from her vet and decided to start making food for Porscha at home. This has been such a game-changer for her and us. The prescription food she used to get she would eat okay, but there were plenty of days when we were throwing part of it away because she simply would not eat all of it. There has not been a single day since we started that she didn’t finish all of her portion. She is loving the new food and is thriving on it. We are currently rotating between the beef and chicken recipes and can tweak these a bit, depending on what we might have in our freezer. We did get permission from her vet to make these changes. She loves when we add peas to the carrot, chicken, and rice mixture. We've also added corn on occasion.
A time-saving hack
What makes this endeavor doable is being able to make a large batch of her food and freeze it in perfect-sized portions. We use these jars to store one serving and can store them in the freezer. We make at least two or three batches at a time, keep 3 to 4 days' worth in the fridge, and freeze the rest. When it’s time to thaw we place it in the fridge a day or two before and let it slowly thaw. It is that simple. The total time is less than an hour of prepping and we can knock out at least a month’s worth in that time frame. Porsche gets one serving in the morning and one in the evening, so for one week it’s 14 jars. The great thing about these jars is that they’re microwavable, freezer-safe, and dishwasher-safe. It makes prep work and cleanup so much easier. We would be lost without these jars. We can stack them in our freezer and can cut down on space, all while making our daily routine easier. We plan to utilize these jars for Mack when the time comes for solids. Stay tuned to see how making homemade baby food is not as daunting as it seems. 🙂
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