Once in awhile we have a bout of picky eat­ing around here and you may, too.

We’ve found a spoon­ful or two of home­made kib­ble top­per perks up our crew’s appetite. This is our eas­i­est recipe, need­ing only two ingre­di­ents, ten min­utes, and it’s scaleable. That is, what you pur­chase for the basic ingre­di­ents eas­ily changes the pro­tein source, how organic it is, the fat con­tent, and how much the dish will cost.

10-Minute Home­made Kib­ble Topper

  • 1 lb. ground meat (Beef, bison, chicken, turkey, or lamb. Reg­u­lar, lean, or super-lean. Choose stan­dard, grass-fed, or free-range.)
  • 1 bag of frozen veg­gies (Peas & car­rots or green beans)

Place ground meat in microwav­able dish and break apart with a spoon.

Cover and microwave for 2 min­utes. Remove. Stir and break up chunks. Microwave again for 1 more minute.

Stir in frozen veg­gies. Microwave for another 2 min­utes. Stir and microwave for another 2 minutes.

Let mix­ture cool for a 3–5 min­utes and it’s ready to serve.

Now you have nearly two pounds of home­made top­per; about the equiv­a­lent of three cans of pre­mium canned food. We store ours in the refrig­er­a­tor in a sealed con­tainer, scoop out what we need per meal, reheat for a few sec­onds in the microwave. Viola! Warm, yummy kib­ble top­ping and happy, dish-cleaning dogs.

You can see how eas­ily this recipe adjusts in qual­ity, price, and fla­vor. Buy ground meat on sale or spend the extra cash for hormone-free meat and organic veg­gies. Dog aller­gic to beef? Try ground chicken. Wor­ried about fat con­tent? Drain the meat before adding the veg­gies. (Too much fat can cause annoy­ing diges­tive issues, chubby pets, or worst of all, pan­cre­ati­tis.) No wor­ries about salt, because you aren’t adding any. Check the ingre­di­ent list of the frozen veg­eta­bles though; some­times they do con­tain salt.

Chop­ping up fresh veg­gies will add time, but if you feel it’s worth the extra effort, go for it! In addi­tion to peas, car­rots, and green beans, own­ers who feed raw sug­gest broc­coli, spinach, and cel­ery. Just remem­ber to skip onions. Here is an excel­lent arti­cle of foods to stay away from at Fetchdog.com: Deli­cious for us, Dan­ger­ous to Dogs; Foods to Keep Away From Your Dog

One note, do your dog a big favor; even if the ground meat is a bar­gain, avoid those con­tain­ing pink slime. (Ground meat with pink slime is con­sid­ered human grade, but we wouldn’t want to feed ammo­nium hydrox­ide to our dogs.) ABC News has a list of stores which do not sell ground meat with pink slime: Pink-Slime-Free Beef. We are very happy to see our local gro­cery store chain, H-E-B, sells ground beef sans this additive.

If you are feed­ing kib­ble, this recipe is a nice way have the con­ve­nience of kib­ble, but with a lit­tle sump’n extra made by you on top. Let us know what your kitchen floor crit­ics think of your cooking.