Yesterday I drove over to Peaslee's, the farm just across the Connecticut River in Guildhall, Vermont, to pick up a load of 500 pounds (228 kg) of potatoes. This has been a family farm for 80 years, and you can read about the history of this wonderful local institution (and see a related video) here. I took the photo above when I got back and started to unload the 50-pound (23 kg) bags.
The potatoes, of course, are for the pet food we're making using our own humanely raised cattle. We're going through about 20 pounds (9 kg) of potatoes a day, cooking and then mashing them. For the first several weeks we were mashing them by hand, along with the cooked carrots, but you can imagine the toll that took on our arms, day after day. So we recently bought a super-duper mixer, which has really lightened the load a lot.
Here's a photo I took late this morning after Alayne had started 15 pounds of potatoes boiling on the stove … the arm-saver mixer is on the right:
Alayne cooked and mashed a total of 50 pounds of potatoes today; we always try to keep at least one day's worth of food already prepared and in the fridge, just in case something happens and we run out of time to cook and mix the huge batch of food we feed every day.
The dogs love their new diet; we haven't seen them this excited about eating since … well, since the last time we were doing home-cooked meals for them!
(Now, someone's bound to ask if we know about raw diets … yes, we do. We tried that a few years ago and found that it worked well for some dogs and not others. We decided cooking was the best approach for us.)
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