Best Food for a Boxer

Many people have asked us how we fed our beloved Boxer, Chuisle. Chuisle came to live with me on Labor Day weekend in 2005. She was rail thin and very sick with Boxer Colitis. A month or so later, after many doctors' visits and hospital stays, and frustrated that she was getting no better and was actually sicker, I insisted that we leave Tuft’s animal hospital for the last time. I took Chuisle home and began making the Best Food for a Boxer, experimenting as I went along. In the beginning, I peeled the sweet potatoes and cooked the beef and barley and oatmeal and eggs separately. Then I mixed it all together and stored them in empty cottage cheese and yogurt containers. When Chuisle was a bit over one and half-years old, I met Gerry and we began making her food at his house in Norfolk. We quickly realized we could cook it all (except the barley and eggs, cottage cheese or yogurt) without peeling the sweet potatoes in the crock pot. We needed more to last the week, though, so switched to a large soup pot and made about 18-20 cups each week.

So for a decade, we made her food every week in large batches. We mixed about 1-1/2 cups in the morning with cottage cheese cooked with an egg. In the evening, we topped her dish with plain yogurt. Chuisle lived healthily and happily until the week after Labor Day weekend in 2016. She had the healthiest, softest coat and a bounce in her prance. We lost our beautiful, faithful Boxer on September 12, 2016. We love her and miss her. We estimate that she ate over 3500 pounds of sweet potatoes, 1000 pounds of beef, and 600 large containers of cottage cheese and plain yogurt and 300-dozen eggs, over 1000 packages of barley, and 1000 cups of uncooked oatmeal in those 11 years!

Here's the final recipe we came to rely on:

A large pot and some water to partially cover about 7-8 large sweet potatoes, peel on and cut into 1/2 inch rounds or wedges.

About 1-1/2 cups of oatmeal (we used Trader Joe's)

1 to 2 pounds 80% fat ground beef

2 packages of Trader Joe's 10 minute barley

Simmer the sweet potatoes and oatmeal until they are soft but not mushy. Throw in some extra stock or broths that you might have hanging around. You want your end result to be mushy, not too firm or watery, so you'll have to experiment.

Toss in the ground beef and break up all of it with a large masher. (We used one that didn't totally mash up everything.) Simmer until beef is no longer pink.  Shut off the heat and pour in 1-2 packages of the barley. There should be enough water so that the barley is covered with potatoes and meat. If not, add very hot water to the simmering pot. Cover and leave for about a half hour. Mix it all up and store it in the frig in individual meal dishes or one big container.

You can toss in some leftovers with the barley. Extra veggies, chicken or lamb meat. Bacon fat. Whatever. It's good for them! (We cooked chicken carcasses and lamb bones and stored the small bits of meat and broth for our Best Food for a Boxer cooking days.)