My black Labrador Bleu initially inspired the tribute to our furry friends and their appetites. Since his puppy days, food has been a motivator. During puppy school, I tried several “treats” that wouldn’t interfere with his mild food allergies. Fresh, raw green beans, sliced carrots, and pieces of cheddar cheese from a local grass-fed farmer quickly became his favorite rewards. When he hears a Ziploc bag open or any plastic bag crinkle in the kitchen, Bleu’s there with his nose in the air and his pink tongue ready.

 

As many pet owners argue, begging is unbecoming. But in Bleu’s defense I sometimes (sometimes being the key word) enjoy his over-the-top enthusiasm for all things tasty. Maybe it’s because I regularly see myself begging to try what’s on my husband’s plate if we order different dishes at a restaurant. Or I acknowledge that I too sometimes forget all sense of manners and start chowing down before all of the guests are seated at the table. Bleu and I share this same pull towards food, which allows me to be a little forgiving towards his bad habits. Quite frankly, I probably am an enabler of his poor manners; I share food with him as I would with a friend, even after our trainer warned, “Table food only should be a reward for staying or shaking. Bleu will take advantage of you if you give him people food whenever you want.”  I just can’t deny those droopy eyes, the puddle of drool by his front paws or the cocking of his head when I say, “Mmmmm, this is so good.” Bleu is my foodie mirror; I imagine I look just like him when I have food envy at Revolver restaurant or when I walk into a kitchen that smells divine. I can’t help myself. Neither can Bleu.

 

Beyond food, Bleu just finds the kitchen comforting. Many of our friends know Bleu has a lively fellow who prefers jumping instead of kindly greeting guests and French kissing friends on the mouth instead of a sweet nuzzle. But when either Dan or I are in the kitchen, Bleu calmly lies down and lulls himself asleep to the clanking of dishes, simmering of soups and sizzling of meats. Even though his 85-pound body sprawled across our very small galley kitchen seems more like an obstacle to avoid than a sweetly sleeping dog, I don’t mind. There are days when all I want is to be in the kitchen working intently on a recipe with Bleu at my feet.  Those moments together calm my worries and soothe the stresses of any bad day. Or least they give me positive memories for the times when Bleu attempts to steal crispy bacon or run off with a guest’s napkin.

 

After doing the first pets-as-foodies issue for From Plate to Palate, I realized Bleu and I weren’t alone--that many foodies are pet owners who raise four-legged (even eight-legged) food lovers. In this annual theme issue, Stephanie King Strickland offers a recipe for cats with sensitive systems and Andrea Iglar recounts the hilarious (and very familiar) event of being woken for “First Breakfast” by her pet, Tooncie the cat. In “Appetite for Destruction,” Jeannie Kidera lists the usual and unusual treats her Golden Retriever Emmet has helped himself to.  Anna Kauffman and Callista Buchen confirm that bunnies and guinea pigs are no strangers to people food and demand quality eats too! And most unique to this issue, Sherri Doust shares Scarlett the tarantula’s favorite snacks. Knowing these pets personally makes me giddy to honor them in this issue. So grab your fuzzy companion, snuggle on the couch with a snack for two, and enjoy this tribute to animals and their foodie adventures.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kitsch is a unique cat.  He dances along to the music in his head most days, not really paying attention to the things going on around him.  He never learned to jump, and so he just be-bops along on the ground until someone lifts him up.  He likes to be under the blankets rather than on them.  He’d rather bat at a hair-tie than play with a catnip-mouse.  And he’s bald.  His uniqueness extends into his eating habits.  Kitsch is a voracious eater, who wolfs his food down so fast he makes himself sick.  And he would eat anything put in front of him (I’ve witnessed him nibbling lettuce that had fallen to the ground).  Unfortunately, Kitch’s uniqueness doesn’t allow him to be the “foodie” he’d like to be.  Kitsch suffers from a terribly sensitive stomach.  He can’t eat any beef.  Some grains disturb him.  And the dyes in many hard cat foods are too harsh on his system.  He will drop into a horrible, sometimes weeks long, stage of sickness where he loses weight and lays around the house in a stupor.  Thankfully, we’ve found ways to cope with this problem.  Firstly, we changed his normal, cat food, diet to a “sensitive systems” brand of hard food.  But, he is not satisfied with hard food alone, so every other day he receives turkey or chicken.  It’s true that cats, like dogs, enjoy table scraps every now and then, and who can blame them – some of us humans enjoy some really great food.  Since Kitsch is not allowed a variety of foods, we’ve developed some recipes for his sensitive tummy that allow him to enjoy “fine” kitty dining.  What follows is a recipe that will allow a pet with a sore tummy some time to heal and get his system more regular.  This is usually best served after kitty has fasted for a few hours.

 

 

1            boneless chicken breast tender (They usually come in 1 lb packs.  I like to use the leftover chicken to make myself a grilled chicken salad)

½ cup    chicken broth (home brewed or canned is fine)

¼ cup    cooked white rice

 

Boil the chicken breast tender for 10-15 minutes.  Once cooked, remove chicken from water and allow to cool.  Dice cooled chicken to a reasonable size for chewing.  Add cooled chicken to warm chicken broth (slightly more than room temperature, but no warmer or you’ll burn kitty’s mouth).  Add cooked white rice to mixture.  Stir, and serve.

 

If you’re feeling really generous, or your cat is very hungry, you can scramble up one egg and add it to the soup (make sure it’s cooked.  Raw eggs are dangerous for kitty).  A cooked egg is a great source of protein and should not cause any digestive distress to a kitty with a sour stomach.

 

Kitty will feel like he’s getting a treat, but really, this blander diet will allow him time to heal.  It’s bland enough, while still being flavorful, that his digestive system will not be bothered and he will chow down and replenish any fluids he’s lost through sickness.  Bon Appétit from our unique kitschy cat to yours!

 

 


Scarlett, a Mexican red-knee tarantula, has been a pint-sized resident in my home for the past ten years. Although crickets are clearly her preferred choice, she can be a rather indiscriminate foodie, munching on everything from giant mealworms to earthworms. She has also been offered death’s head cockroach nymphs, but she repeatedly shuns them; in fact, she downright skitters away from them (screaming silent spider screams, I imagine). I guess she prefers her dinners to be less crunchy-on-the-outside…!

My golden retriever, Emmet, is four and a half years old, and while that puts him at about thirty-one and a half in human years, he is decidedly a sixteen year old boy in disguise.  Yes, I am one of those people who is unapologetically convinced that my dog is both human and can process every word I’m saying, whether he chooses to respond accordingly or not (and sometimes he does respond accordingly, I swear).  Not unlike the teenage boys I teach.  He shares their fluctuating energy levels as well; remaining lethargically splayed out on the floor beside me – no modesty whatsoever – tongue lolling out the side of his mouth like a dirty sock one moment, only to spring up the second someone else arrives, hyper-orbiting them with whatever the nearest toy was in his mouth, joyously extolling their presence with sounds most accurately compared to the mating call of George Lucas’ wookies.  But the trait that most closely links Emmet with the tribe of teenage boys is his voracious and unabashed appetite.

The vast majority of my “Emmet stories” involve him ingesting something.  Luckily, with the exception of the first year of his life, these things have mostly resided within the realm of the edible.  But that first year was rough, though his digestive system miraculously never seemed to think so.  When he was eight weeks old, I brought Emmet – full name, Emmet the Bearslayer – home, and when he was ten weeks old, I considered renaming him Emmet the Birdslayer.  He was only about twelve pounds when he proved himself as a “bird dog”, and by “bird dog” I mean a dog with a taste for eating birds, not retrieving them.  A cardinal had gotten trapped inside the stairwell of my building one morning, and in an attempt to start my day with a Cinderella moment, I put down my puppy and set out to aid the helpless creature back into the wild.  Cupping it in my palms, I gently tossed it towards the propped open door, only to watch it skitter behind a garbage can in the corner of the landing.  Within five seconds Emmet had the beautiful red bird clenched in his tiny, razor-sharp puppy teeth.  I remember screaming aloud “This is the worst rescue effort ever,” as I tried with all my might to pry his jaws apart and the dark eyes of the bird looked at me pleadingly.  Finally, I got Emmet’s mouth to open, but just as I was about to shake the shocked bird from his clutches, he gave one solid gulp, and the still alive bird was swallowed whole.  Still alive.  Whole.  I spent the day hysterically waiting for my new puppy to die.  I called the vet.  I searched the internet.  I finally looked at him and realized he looked pretty happy with himself.  He was fine.  No, he was more than fine.  He was licking his lips.

Technically, I suppose the cardinal qualifies as edible, but it served as a nice segue, or appetizer I suppose, to the things he was definitely not supposed to eat that year.  Like, oh, I don’t know, say his leash?  A week before Emmet’s first Christmas, I returned home at 4 A.M. from a night of holiday festivities, to find that the friend who had walked him for me earlier in the evening had left him in the kitchen with his leash still attached.  I clumsily reached down to grab it and take him out, but each time I grabbed for it, I came up empty.  Puzzled, I focused on focusing – remember, it was both a night of holiday festivities and 4 A.M. – and found that the only part of his leash attached to him was the four inches closest to his collar; in other words, the part he couldn’t reach with his mouth.   The next morning I searched high and low, under the fridge, under the couch, in the closet, but the rest of his leash was simply gone.  Until, that is, one week later when, at 7 A.M. on Christmas morning, he threw up all three missing feet of his leash in its entirety, like a long string of spaghetti rolled into a ball.  On my bed.  Happy holidays, indeed.

Believe it or not, this was not the strangest thing to come out of Emmet’s mouth (and, therefore, go into it).  One night I woke up in the middle of the night with an overwhelming sense that something was wrong.  Looking over, I saw Emmet sitting up on the bed next to me, not breathing.  Suddenly, my latent maternal instincts took over and I found myself sticking my arm, elbow-deep, down his throat.  The moment I knew I loved this dog more than anything else, the moment I knew I had the potential to someday make a suitable mother to a human child, was when I remained outwardly calm as I spotted the head of a snake coming out of his throat with my hand.  Oh dear lord, I was pulling a snake, a big snake, out of my dog’s mouth on my bed and I wasn’t letting go.  It wasn’t until my whole arm was out in the open that I realized that, in fact, the object obstructing Emmet’s airway, the object I had just yanked from his body, was the front half of a rubber toy alligator.  I don’t own a rubber alligator.  I don’t know anyone who owns a rubber alligator.  I don’t know what happened to the back half of the rubber alligator.

What I do know is that our daily environment is ideal for the black hole of Emmet’s belly.  Because I work and live at a boarding school, Emmet has spent his life thus far in community with about four hundred high school students.  This has only fueled his food obsession, as “snacks” appear readily.  A simple walk past the dining hall is a scavenging adventure.  Emmet has single-handedly cleaned the campus of no less than a dozen apple cores, on occasion a hamburger patty or a fallen cookie.  But his most successful “finds” took the form of surprise attacks.  Once while I was walking him across campus on the first day of school, my arms too encumbered by a massive stack of books and syllabi to have full control of his retractable leash, my deceivingly sweet looking golden welcomed a new student the way I imagine Scut Farkus from A Christmas Story may have welcomed her.  The unwitting girl was strolling down the sidewalk, carrying a nicely wrapped Dave’s Cosmic Sub in her hand, saving it for later, when she made the mistake of pausing – just for a second – to admire Emmet’s handsome mug.  Before I could even yank on his leash, Emmet had that sub out of her hand, removed it from the wrapper, and gobbled it down with a grin, as if to say “Welcome to my world, freshman!”  All he was missing was a coon skin hat and a slingshot.

As great as I know that was for him, that wasn’t the best day of Emmet’s life; no that day would come in time, and when it did, I’m sure he thought he had been softly lifted into a sweet, sweet dream from which he never wanted to be woken.  I, however, felt I had stumbled into some terrible, foreign, B-level horror movie.  It went something like this:  It is, once again, the first day of school, and Emmet and one of his campus doggie friends are enjoying some off-leash exercise out by the cross-country course, when suddenly, Emmet spots them like a grand mirage.  There by the pond are the new Korean students sitting in a giant circle in the grass…and they are eating pizza.  Lots of pizzas.  They have pieces of pizzas on paper plates in their laps, totally defenseless.  They have at least five open boxes of pizzas in the center of the circle.  OPEN boxes of pizza.  ON THE GROUND!

I heard the screams first.  And then I saw it.  The great pizza massacre.  Most of them were shrieking in their native language, though the one upperclass boy among them, much to my embarrassment, was yelling “Hey!  That’s my teacher’s dog!”  Some tried to guard their slices, others threw their slices away from them – sacrificial offerings to the shaggy, drooling monster frantically circling their circle.  As soon as he saw me chasing him (his frenzy and the terrified yells had deadened his ears to my commands), he leapt into the center of the circle. 

JACKPOT!  Not only did he manage to snag half a pizza, tomato sauce carnage smeared all over his snout, he impressively used another whole pizza pie for leverage, sinking all four paws into its cheesy center and pushing off hard.  If he could laugh, I’m certain Emmet would have sent a Vincent Price-style cackle reeling across the pond that day.  His doggie friend?  Sitting calmly at his owner’s side the whole time, enjoying the show.  Sometimes I get a little sad for Emmet because I’m not sure it’s ever going to get better than that for my eternally hungry pet.

Now, I’m not lying when I say that Emmet will sit, patient but alert, beside me while I eat any given meal, not begging but waiting well-mannered for me to finish.  He doesn’t nose my elbow or jump at my plate.  He sits, knowing that when the Alpha (that’s me) is done, she might let him lick her plate.  She might not.  A lot of people don’t believe me though, at least people who have tried to eat around him.  The problem, as my mother likes to say whenever I visit her, is that in Emmet’s mind, at least as far as food is concerned, I am the Alpha, he is the Beta, and everyone else (particularly my mother) is more or less Omega.   If it’s not in my hand, it’s fair game.  That being said, my mother’s home is the only place I’ve ever seen him lift his front paws off of the ground (and onto a table or counter) to steal food.  He’s no fool, he knows at the holidays, when there are babies and children distracting people, it’s prime time to slip under the radar of the food police.  He has grabbed a whole block of cheese off her dining room table, successfully swallowing the majority of it whole when I broke the ends of the cheese off trying to pull it from his mouth.  And, most recently, with perfect timing – just as my mother stepped into the kitchen doorway to ask if she could give him a treat because he was “looking for food” – he jumped up and snatched the peanut butter sandwich she was making off the counter.  Ah peanut butter…his weakness.  It is the food he most craves and the food he is most allergic to; still, tell him that a half hour spent with his snout shoved in a very nearly empty peanut butter container, tongue lavishly bathing every bit of its walls with surgeon-like precision and patience, will cost him at least a week of gnawing and scratching at his itchy skin and maybe even an ear infection, and he’ll say “it’s worth it.”  And you kind of have to admire that.  He’s shamelessly hedonistic, particularly when it comes to food, and, yeah, sometimes that means he has to sacrifice things temporarily.  Like dignity…or, in the case of the rubber alligator, breathing.  But people stop me in the park to say “Your dog is actually smiling!”  You’ll never meet a happier dog.

 

I hear a zipper swatted, a window blind battered or a book falling to the floor.

I feel my bed pounced, my toes bitten or my elbow licked.

I wake either gradually with sleepy eyes, or quickly with a startled and angry, “Tooncie Bear!”

What a funny name to say so sternly to such a cute, striped, otherwise loveable cat.

It is 6:30 a.m., and Tooncie is ready for First Breakfast. He is obstinate and won’t take no for an answer. The longer I put off obeying his demands for a sprinkle of Purina pellets, the more hairbrushes, magazines and coasters he whacks off my nightstand and dressing table.

Plunk! There goes the Kleenex box. I look at Tooncie, and he looks at me, front paw in the air, poised to take a swipe at my bedside Sudoku puzzles unless I stir and rise and head for the kitchen.

I created the monster, and now I don’t know how to stop him. So usually I shuffle down the stairs, pour a small serving of dry food for Tooncie and his better-behaved sister Jolly, swig some orange juice, use the bathroom, and return to the bedroom.

I don’t pick up the array of fallen objects because they would only provide fodder for Tooncie when Second Breakfast comes around at 9:30.

Nearly five years ago, our household decided to adopt two kittens: siblings, so they would have companionship. I’d never before raised animals, and they were my first real pets, so I was inclined to provide and spoil. Tooncie, having been the runt of the litter, was sick at first, so we fed him formulas from a dropper and then eased him into a regular, veterinarian-recommended, commercial food diet. I was happy to see his health improve and his diet normalize, and therefore glad to feed him whenever he asked. The problem was, he asked way too early in the morning.

I blame both my inexperience as a cat caretaker and the unfortunate layout of my 100-year-old house: the only bathroom must be accessed through the kitchen, past the food dishes. Early on, when my dreams of waterfalls and running faucets forced me to rise in the pre-dawn darkness and head for the bathroom, the cats invariably followed me and, once in the kitchen, meowed so pathetically and convincingly and adorably that I reached for the cupboard above the stove and sprinkled some pellets into their little bowls.

It was a recipe for disaster.

The morning feeding habit persists to this day because the ingredients remain: a hungry, stubborn cat with smart tricks; a tired, fairly compliant human tall enough to reach the food container; and a bathroom off the kitchen.

Being a night owl who often goes to bed well after midnight, I occasionally try to break Tooncie of his early-morning mischief by evicting him from the bedroom. Sometimes this gains me a few hours of solid sleep, but other times, Tooncie’s miserable meows from outside the door either disturb my conscience and therefore slumber, or else cause Jolly to take up his cause and lick my forehead until I let her fuzzy brother back inside.

Meanwhile, I admit to being thoroughly trained to do Tooncie’s bidding. My cat uses clever stratagems to call his human to the kitchen, and I usually obey, even waking on my own some mornings at 6:30 or 9:30, my body viscerally aware that it’s feline mealtime.

Once fed, Tooncie returns to his most comfortable nook in the crook of my neck and purrs us back to sleep. I blissfully forget that in another three hours, I will be rudely awakened for First Lunch.

I have a rabbit named Padfoot. He loves to eat.

 

My husband and I rescued Padfoot from a local humane society almost 3 years ago. Since then, Padfoot has made his boundaries perfectly clear. Padfoot is not a lap bunny. He will not allow us to pick him up. He won’t nuzzle our noses or jump on the couch and watch TV with us. Padfoot is more likely to kick the glasses off my face in an attempt to run away from the nail clippers. And although he’s grown kind enough to allow us to pet him while he’s sitting in his cage (as long as we don’t make any sudden movements toward grabbing him), Padfoot will only show us affection on one occasion: feeding time.

 

At any other time of day, one might find Padfoot lying on his back or sitting crouched like a hen with his eyes half closed. At morning feeding time, however, Padfoot springs to life, stands up on his hind legs, and eagerly awaits the filling of his food dish. He graciously allows me to remove the empty dish from his sights, sometimes pawing my hand as if to remind me, “We’ve got a deal here, right? You can take that, but you will put more food in it and give it right back.” As I return Padfoot’s food dish, full of yummy rabbit pellets, he dives his nose in and gets to work immediately, letting me pet his head and scratch behind his ears while he dines.

 

While Padfoot’s absence of affection for anything but food might seem like perfectly normal rabbit behavior, it isn’t. I grew up loving and caring for many pet rabbits, but none behaved like Padfoot. Most of my rabbits liked being held, loved attention, and rationed their food so meticulously that you could leave them with two full dishes for a weekend, and they’d eat at an appropriate pace. Bunnies are smart animals. And Padfoot is too; but he’s also really hungry.

 

I blame Padfoot’s early days. Before we rescued him, Padfoot was removed from a home by law enforcement because his owner had too many animals and was neglecting them. I hate to imagine what my poor bunny went through and how little attention and food he received.  Naturally, Padfoot now quickly consumes all the food he is given because he once didn’t know when his next meal would arrive.

 

Kauffman4 The other problem is that I’m a sucker. I look at Padfoot’s past and cry about how my sweetly stubborn bunny was treated. So I feed the dude. I give him lettuce at night, sometimes carrots, sometimes Timothy hay. Padfoot devours them all. He’s also developed favorites. Padfoot particularly enjoys organic and local lettuce. If I give him iceberg lettuce, he occasionally turns up his nose in disgust to communicate, “Really, fools? I should debase myself for such petty roughage?” This disgust only lasts a moment, and he’ll eat the iceberg as soon as I walk away.

 

Out of curiosity, I once offered Padfoot a grape. I put it in his food dish and he looked at me, perplexed. To help him get the scent of the grape, I cut off the skin and put the grape back in his dish. With vigor, he greedily consumed this new treasure. I don’t give him grapes that often though. I love Padfoot, but I’m not about to peel the skins off individual grapes for my hoity-toit bunny.

 

Padfoot’s life hasn’t always been happy. I hope he’s happy now, even if he doesn’t often show it. But I know, with total confidence, that Padfoot is happy when he eats. And while other bunnies eat for sustenance alone, I can tell that

Padfoot relishes in feeding. It gives him joy. That makes me pretty happy.

 

My husband and I are the proud, the sometimes too-proud, owners of two beautiful long-haired guinea pigs. There are a bunch of guinea pig breeds, but our lovies, Miss Ella Fitzgerald and Miss Amelia Bedelia (Ella and Millie for short), seem to be a mysterious combination of bits and pieces of different types that have resulted in a great deal of hairy puffiness and out-of-control cowlicks. This wild hair, spiraled and mohawked and eminently photogenic, has done nothing to hinder their ferocious appetites.

 

Rather, Ella and Millie live for eating. I prefer to think that they live for our love and affection, but in their world, as in the worlds of so many of us, food simply is love. When we come home, instead of running at our feet or licking our faces like puppies, the pigs start squeaking and chirping at the sound of the refrigerator door. These squeaks quickly turn to sirens and wails until we say hello with baby carrots or a leaf or two of kale. Ella prefers to eat food while we hold it. She’d rather savor and nibble at a carrot you hold for her, while Millie viciously grabs her food, her slice of cucumber, her sprig of parsley, her very own carrot, and dashes into her igloo house to eat as quickly and privately as possible. She flies so fast, on her plump little belly and little legs, she goes blurry and moves with insect-like precision. Buchen3

 

Guinea pigs have an amazing behavior when they’re happy or excited. Guinea pig people call this “pop-corning” (I love that even this term comes from the world of food). They involuntarily jump when they’re pleased, bursting into the air with a kind of mini-seizure, all from joy. Guinea pigs tend to grow out of pop-corning when they get older, as their body weight gets harder to lift and their joints get sore. But for Ella and Millie, who are four (in guinea pig land, that’s middle-aged or so), the peel of a green apple, among other treats, can still bring on the happy-seizures.

 

Just any snack won’t do, though. Ella and Millie were initially raised on organic, bio-dynamic veggies from a local farm. They can tell the difference between a carrot and an organic carrot. They eat Timothy hay that comes in the mail in giant fifty-pound boxes because they simply won’t eat the more available orchard hay, and the stuff at the pet store is too scratchy or too brown or too something for their palettes. They wouldn’t touch the expired guinea pig food we once bought by accident (and promptly threw away once we realized our mistake). In short, the girls know food. And they know what they like. They live the way many of us would like to live—with confidence, and with a mouth toward the best.