Book Review: Dinner for Dogs: Home Cooking for a Happy, Healthy Dog

If you’ve read our blog you know we believe wholeheartedly in feeding dogs (and ourselves!) the best food available. We often recommend a raw feed but some dogs don’t do well on a raw diet and will be much better off on a homemade cooked diet. Henrietta Morrison, CEO of Lily’s Kitchen and author of the new book Dinner for Dogs says it best when she says “what is important is that you feed your dog good food. Whether it is cooked or not is not the point.” These days so many of us are paying more attention to what we eat, where it comes from, and how we can use food and herbs to heal ourselves and improve our health. Now, with Henrietta’s book, we can easily learn how to do the same for our dogs.

Feed Your Dog Real Food

Here at City Dog many of our clients want to feed their dogs real food, but worry it might be confusing and too time consuming. This book will help you learn how to implement a real feed with a minimum of effort. The book provides a framework for thinking about canine nutrition (what foods do dogs need? how do I keep the diet balanced? what foods can I give my dog to help with certain conditions?), a listing of the foods that are good for dogs, a listing of foods to avoid feeding dogs, and how to use herbs to treat a variety of common medical conditions like bad breath, itchy skin, digestive upset, and excessive wind.

When we work with behaviourally disordered dogs (dogs with aggression, anxiety, fear etc.) we often recommend the owner improve the quality of the dog’s diet as a first step. This alone rarely cures behavioural problems but it allows us to rule out diet as a cause of the behavioural issue, and frankly, dogs who are being fed a high quality balanced diet are easier to work with.

Without a doubt the nicest commercial food on the market is Lily’s Kitchen. For clients who don’t want to feed a homemade diet we recommend they feed Lily’s. What’s great about Henrietta’s book is that you can mix her recipes with the commercial product, so if you only want to cook for your dog once or twice a week you can do that and feed Lily’s commercial product the rest of the time. With many commercial foods this is not the case, and mixing the commercial and homemade meals will cause stomach upset, so it’s great to have a book like this where the recipes will easily mix with the commercial product.

In the interest of full disclosure, we should mention that we know Henrietta personally and were thrilled when we heard she was coming out with a book on this topic. Henrietta is extraordinarily knowledgeable about and dedicated to canine nutrition, and more importantly, to making it easy for pet owners to feed their dogs well. In fact, one of the nicest features of this book is the number of recipes which can feed humans as easily as dogs, for example, the “Banana Smoothie” which contains just bananas, blueberries, yogurt and flaxseed, the “Frittata” which is made from just potatoes, peas, eggs and oil, or the “Chicken and Barley Soup” which Henrietta herself shared with Lily when last she made it!