Still Behind (I made dog biscuits)

I made dog biscuits from scratch for the first time.

Also, for the first time, I converted oats to oat flour in my blender. It worked really well!

I used this recipe for the dog treats. Instead of flour, I used the oat flour, and instead of non-dairy milk, I used pumpkin puree. The dough didn’t hold together like a dream, but it held together pretty well.

At the time, it seemed like a good idea to double the batch, but that’s not something I would do next time. Of my two untrained brutes, Saffron is the most food-motivated. It took a while for me to roll out all of the dough, which gave him a lot of time to get increasingly excited about what I was doing. When I ran out into the hangup of having insufficient cookie sheet space, I ended up halving the remaining dough between the two dogs because I felt like the dogs would find the dough anyway before I had the chance to make space on the cookie trays that were in use. One batch will suffice in the future.

Hey, I heard you were making cookies...

Perseverance.

Even Bartleby got in on the action, but he was a little calmer about it and easier to call off.

I used Santa Cruz organic peanut butter because it’s just peanuts: no crappy additives. I was very excited when I discovered this! Mind you, I’ve fed my dogs peanut butter with sugar in it before… but it’s nice to avoid it, if possible, since they don’t metabolize it in the same way that humans do.

I used whole wheat flour to flour the rolling pin and roll out the dough. I made thick biscuits and thin ones, and found that the thin ones held up better in the oven.

I’ll be doing it again, and I’d recommend it to people who like to pamper their dogs. I liked that the ingredients were simple: pumpkin, good peanut butter, oatmeal, and traces of wheat from using whole wheat flour to roll out the dough.

Nanowrimo has personal achievement badges that Wrimos can award themselves. One of these badges is “Novel Maestro” for putting together a “writing soundtrack” for your novel. Perfecting such a soundtrack has been a welcome distraction… but oh so distracting. Once I’ve tweaked it to unnecessary perfection, perhaps I’ll publish the list of songs here.

I also discovered “word sprints”. I love word sprints. They’re helping me a lot.

My family is coming up for a few days this week so I’m hoping to get caught up with my word count by then before I get too far behind (I’m still behind, btw).