Writing Backwards

A few weeks ago I was in Seattle talking with a reporter and he asked how I came up with the idea for Feed Your Best Friend Better. The obvious answer was that I wanted to make the recipes from my dog food company, Dog Stew, available to a wider audience - particularly the Warm Nose Meals that are adjusted to help dogs with serious ailments. During that discussion, I actually realized that I wrote the FYBFB backwards.

One of the greatest joys in operating Dog Stew was helping people and their pets when a dog was sick and wouldn't eat. Whether it was cancer, diabetes, heart disease, liver disease or kidney disease dogs not only licked their bowl clean they also started feeling better.  The first recipe I developed for the Warm Nose line of foods was of course the cancer diet Jackson ate and that not only brought him back to the bowl it gave him an additional three years behind his prognosis - all cancer free. When people heard how great Jackson was doing they started asking if I could feed other ailments.  Most of the time I said no, but I'd figure it out if they would give me three weeks. When I closed Dog Stew, my goal was to make all of the Warm Nose recipes available whether you're living in Portland, Oregon or Portland, Maine.  A book seemed like a good place to start so I reworked the recipes to make them easier for the home cook.

The fun part of the book was next; simple meals and easy preparations for every dog.  I started developing a wider range of recipes for healthy dogs.  Mutt Loaf was my first recipe, I like it because it's grain free and contains a healthy dose of veggies.  Focusing on less expensive but healthy cuts of meat for each recipe and vegies that you already have in your refrigerator bin was the basis for most recipes and I threw in some novel grains to create recipes like Cluck and Quinoa.

With a herd of very well behaved dogs, I was always coming up with cookie recipes to reward them.  Finding ways to incorporate herbs and spices like turmeric, ginger, cinnamon and mint led to recipes like Golden Koi and Gingerbread Mailmen.  I'm less than thrilled to cut cookies into little shapes since the dogs don't notice the shape so most of the time I just cut the cookies into squares using a pizza cutter. However, it's the boxes of cookies shaped like fish and gingerbread men that probably helped me get a deal with Andrews McMeel.

Dogs spend upwards of 23 hours a day in our homes and giving them something mentally stimulating that also promotes dental hygiene has huge benefits; even if it's just preventing the couch from being destroyed. Kong stuffings and treat ideas quickly filled up twenty pages.

Finally came one of my favorite parts of the book, and probably a favorite of most readers: Foods Worth Sharing. I really enjoy this part of the book because it highlights foods that are good for dogs and that can be shared right off the cutting board.

My least favorite part of the book was writing the chapter titled "Balancing Act: Nutrients in a Dog's Diet."  I had all the information available but this chapter makes cooking for your dog daunting. It's not. My editor said that I had to include it, so I tried to simplify the concept and use it to point out how certain nutrients can easily be met through real foods and how others really need supplementation. I included my Supplement Stew recipe I used at Dog Stew so that readers could just flip to page 14 if they didn't want to read all the boring science.

I spoke with the team at Andrews McMeel at length about photos for the book and we decided to not include photos of finished dishes, especially since I really don't care how the food looks, and either does your dog. I would have cringed if I had to include photos of Mutt Loaf on a plate with garnishes since this isn't supposed to be a gourmet book, it's about nutrition.  Instead I worked with Alicia Dickerson Griffith of Four Legged Photo to develop the "Your Best Friend..." photo series that celebrates the relationship between us and our companion animals. The models you see in the book are friends, co-workers and even my mom's toes with each person accompanied by their own dog.

Through all of this, I made an effort to make the recipes easy to follow, easy to understand how much to feed different size dogs and of course easy to prepare.  I hope that no matter which page you land on when you open the book you enjoy feeding your best friend better.

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