Dog Valentine

When you are a dog, your main concern is love. The things you need to know are: who will give you love and when it will happen. In fact, you spend most of your days thinking about love and how to get the proper amount, the amount that will sufficiently fill up your tumbling dog-heart and your sweet dog bones. It's remarkably exhausting, to say the least. The idiom "working like a dog" came about for good reason, you know.

In an effort to accumulate his desired amount of valentine love yesterday, Murray set forth with a baking project. His dream, he told me, was to make treats for his friends at the dog park: Sidney, Nico, Kayla, Dixie, Luta, Henry, Casey, Rocky, Hunter, Oscar, Pepper, Duke, Sophie, the other Sophie, Yoshi, Bowie, Chubbs, Lulu, Sierra, Brownie, Alfie, Molly, Snickers, Ava, Mango, Doc, Apollo, Golddust, Marvin, Zinc, Emma, and, "you know, everyone else." He looked away for a moment, thinking some more about valentines. "Plus Buttercup and Charlie." I agreed. Something had to be done. 

We busied ourselves in the kitchen, choosing a recipe from The Doggy Bone Cookbook (thanks, Mom!), selecting the proper size heart-shaped cookie cutters, and creating the dog dough, which made some of us drool just to sniff the peanut butter as it was mixed in.  Forty minutes and five dozen hearts later, we were ready for assembly. Everyone would get their own bag of treats, Murray insisted, and they needed to have valentine stickers on them. Or they just wouldn't be right.

Ziploc bags are difficult when you don't have thumbs, but easier when your mother does. We taste-tested, just to make sure they were edible (they were), packed up the treats in bags, and prepared ourselves for our adventure. "Ugghhh, if I only had a backpack to put these valentines in!" Murray grumbled, impersonating Eeyore so well that it was almost eerie. "A backpack would be nice, I agreed, and I know it's frustrating to not have something when you feel like you need it, but this nice pink human bag will work just as well," I offered. He perked up, then, when he realized we were actually going outside, where zillions of scents were waiting for his very nose. And then we were off!

Murray followed me as I delivered the valentines to the humans, and he sat patiently in the snow with each delivery, hoping to receive one of his own valentines. Luckily, he was sweet about his friends getting the treats, and, luckily, he is lately becoming quite easily distracted by his new orange toy as it's cast through the air. (Fetching? Not really. Watching it be thrown, lumbering over to it, gathering it in his mouth, shaking his head about, then dropping it and moving on to something more interesting, yes.)

And that was Valentines Day. I tried not to mope over my past six weeks of love lost (oh, sheesh! Andy and I are over, by the way. More about this later, when my heart is back in place), and found it all to be quite cured by grits & kale tacos, margaritas, and a few wild laughs with some girlfriends at a new taco and whiskey bar that just opened down the street. No cupid, exactly, and no candy. No love interests, and no flowers. But we had something much better. We had the furriest, peanut-butteriest, wildest romp in the snow. We had friends with tails. And, of course, we had each other. 

Here's to love!

Pea-mutt Butter Dog Treats

from The Doggy Bone Cookbook

Preheat oven to 375. Whisk together 1/4 C peanut butter, 1 T vegetable oil,  and 1 C water. Add in 2 1/4 C whole wheat flour and 1 C oatmeal. Mix well. Roll dough to 1/4" thickness and cut with cookie cutters. Place on parchment-lined cookie sheets (very close together, if you'd like!) and bake for 35 minutes. Cool and store in an airtight container (or inside a dog's stomach).