Local Dog Treats

The refrigerator and freezer inventory is finished, and I've already made some progress on using up a couple of items. From the refrigerator, I finished up some pumpkin butter syrup (just pumpkin butter thinned with maple syrup) on pancakes over the weekend. Then yesterday, the last of the green tomato relish was stirred into vegan mac 'n cheese for a nice dinner. Yesterday, I pulled a small bag of toasted mesquite flour, purchased from Native Seeds last year, from the freezer.


I have mixed feelings about mesquite as food. While the beans can be a good source of food, it's not easy to convert them into a usable flour. Sure, the Indians ground them with rocks, but they also ground down their teeth with the resulting bits of rock included in the flour. And, that's a bit more labor-intensive than even I am willing to deal with. Desert Harvesters, a local group, hosts events around the area with their hammermill, a big industrial mill, to turn the beans into flour.


One year I collected mesquite beans from a tree in my yard. It was a little bit of work to wash the beans and spread them out to dry. Then I stored them in paper bags in the garage until after the summer monsoon season when the hammermill would be available. One day, my sweetie came in and told me my bags were rattling. Uh oh. I had Bruchid beetles - little beetles that lay eggs in the immature beans. The young hatch and emerge from little holes in the beans. (See first picture above to see the perfectly round little holes.) The beetles are harmless, but they leave lots of little holes in the beans (and paper bag) and can be a pest flying all over the place. I finally threw the beans in the freezer.


After thawing them out in time to dry thoroughly for the milling, I waited in line for some time to mill my beans into flour. After hours of collecting, cleaning, drying, and milling my beans, I discovered that the flour did not taste great. Despite having tried the beans first and thinking they were fine, my batch of flour had an unpleasant aftertaste and all my efforts were for naught.

Not easily discouraged, my sweetie and I made our way a few months ago to a mesquite tasting event where foods made from recipes for a new mesquite cookbook were being sampled. We're not sure whether it was from the mesquite or some other ingredient, but both of us had a strange reaction in our mouths and throats - a little swelling and sensitivity. This didn't seem to happen to other folks that we are aware of, but it has made us wary of eating mesquite.


So, here I was yesterday holding a bag of mesquite flour thinking I really don't want to eat this but I'm not supposed to be wasting food with my revised challenge! An image of my dogs munching on the mesquite beans on the back patio came into my head. I decided to try baking some dog treats for them using mesquite flour. Because mesquite does not contain gluten, I used half mesquite flour and half wheat flour. The wheat flour was ground by my sweetie using our pedal-powered set-up and delicious wheat berries from my CSA.

Mesquite-Wheat Dog Crackers


3/4 cup mesquite flour
3/4 cup whole wheat flour
1/3 cup soy flour
Shells from 2 eggs, dried and pulverized in a blender
1/2 cup + 1 tbs water
1/4 cup + 1/2 tbs oil (I used olive and sesame oils.)

Preheat oven (or solar oven) to 350 degrees.
Mix dry ingredients.
Stir together water and oil; quickly pour into dry ingredients.
Mix well.
Divide dough in half and place on two baking sheets.
Roll out until flat, making sure the thickness is even throughout. (Otherwise, the edges will brown before the center like mine did.)
Score lightly with a pizza roller before baking.
Bake for at least twenty minutes until golden brown.
Remove from the oven and turn off the heat.
After the treats have cooled slightly, cut through with the pizza roller.
If any pieces (especially from the center) are not crisp, return them to the oven to dry out.


I broke the crackers into small sizes to use for training treats and my dogs think they are just dandy.