thecounterintuitivekitchen

I excitedly took a photo of my dog’s food bowl, which was licked nearly clean. I was on Sick Day Two, the day that followed Sick Day One. Sick Day One I was mostly prone, and dwelling inside one large pointillist painting with neither park nor beach, composed of a million dismal-colored aches and pains and a headache, and so drained of energy, joie de vivre, and purpose that I cried not once but two times when holding my book upright seemed like too much effort. Sick Day Two was less horrible and involved watching a teen romance movie through my fingers because the remote was Away from Me and the young gentleman in the film was doing a lot of hair acting and yet, agency-wise, I was at an impasse. Similar to when you have to go to the bathroom but you are also half asleep and hoping for a conversion into being fully asleep, so you neither pee nor sleep, and thus are in a purgatory, which is a little sad plat created by your lack of volition. Sick Day Two also involved a $6.99 roasted chicken from the grocery store, which I broke down while listening to Amy Poehler glaze Jon Hamm. And then from the bones of the chicken whose life was given for any of us to do whatever with, I made chicken stock, whilst swaying and feeling old and occasionally forgetting why I was there. And I chopped up the chicken for Rhoda, who is a five-year-old goldendoodle that appears to be a puppy to everyone I meet while out on walks with her, because she is endlessly pumped and eager to give love and receive love.

I also boiled a sweet potato and a bag of green beans and blended them up. And liquidated soft vegetables from our refrigerator into the compost and then also pickled a bunch of red onion that seemed on the verge. At that point I remembered that everything I was doing was a side quest: I had intended to put pork in the slow cooker so as to accomplish one thing on Sick Day Two (tacos later) and return to the couch and dream of the West Coast, as I had for several days for no clear reason, because I don’t think there is any relief to be found on the West Coast.

Rhoda is a lover, not a fighter, and was not much of an eater for several years. (I met a dog once who was officially diagnosed by the vet as an “indiscriminate eater” and that doesn’t seem to require any further explanation but a knock-on effect of that is that dog would eat any food in any dog bowl or cat dish anywhere, anytime. This started dog fights and cat fights and cat-on-dog fights.) But regarding my dog, who has been happy to pooh-pooh bowls and bowls of food, the embodied carbon and God knows what else in cans and cans of uneaten Blue’s stews or Blue’s variety packs was making me crazy. Also when you care for a being, you want to nourish that being. We kept saying she wasn’t “food motivated,” but she was monstrously motivated by pizza and cheese, and eventually I thought that making her food might be less wasteful and more appealing, cost-effective, and less likely to include horse parts than buying cans of food. (I am not implying that Buffalo Blue includes horse parts.) These are the small actions we take to try to exert some small measure of control in the face of massive systemic failures propped up by the sad, laterally if not downwardly mobile offspring of elites seeking validation by failing forward into pollution-based income streams and endless extraction and trolling and dreams that the 1980s were just the greatest, with the greatest tits and the greatest bulging groins. Anyway, to use many fewer cans and throw less stuff away, I got drunk on internet advice and came up with two recipes for dog food, which was mostly boiling, grinding, and browning and then dumping things together, and was thus both pretty easy and it reminded me of my short-lived success making organic baby food back in the day. The throughline: no seasoning, few timing issues.

Sick Day Two was a day when we had run out of homemade dog food, except for some large chunks of sweet potato. A goldendoodle’s face is usually a fluff of soft hair and piercing stares. What is also contained in the face is a precision-tool tongue that can find the one shred of cheese in a heap of wet dog food, eat that, and leave all else behind. Also, they look like thoughtful dragons. They are as curly-spined as dragons, based on what Game of Thrones has shown me, and I do feel that if their hair turned to scales, and they lacked ears, they would just be dragons minus the flames and the flying.

So, if you are trying to get your dog to eat protein, the vegetables the internet sources suggest, some fat, some brown rice, maybe a vitamin and maybe some pumpkin, how do you do it? You can’t blend it all together, because it will be rejected. Nor can you have discrete items, because then there will be a disgusting bowl on the floor with shriveled green beans, damp kibble, and hardening rice but no trace of meat. Not that you want old meat on your floor. 

On Sick Day Two, after barely making it from the couch to the chair to the basement where I stood dwelling in the mystery of what propelled me there, and then back to the kitchen, I focused for probably two full minutes on combining finely chopped chicken with rice, small amounts of pureed vegetables that stuck to each of those things, kibble, and crumbs of cheddar cheese. 

I hyped it all up to Rhoda and then put the bowl down and walked away, prepared to just dump it later and go on to… what? Invade a sovereign nation full of torture dungeons? Or torture office parks? Cut jobs? Run face-first into a terrifying technology? Do nothing and focus on branding and fundraising? Fall asleep in my chair? 

But lo! Rhoda ate it all and licked the bowl. Which pulled me out of my calculations regarding whether it was more or less wasteful to make food for a dog, and whether the “set it and forget it” method of monthly food bank donations was the right move or something I should reassess based on changing economic conditions. I realized again what I realized 14 years ago while high as a kite in front of a barn. That usually all you need to do is try a little. Just try a little harder to do the thing in a way that might work, I said and another person said. We gave ourselves the task of trying to say that with one-syllable words, which I think caused us to say, “try more hard to do the thing more right,” which sounded like we were non-native speakers, which we were not but it still seems like we are.