Miracle Wheels

My dog Muttley has mobility issues. Due to a combination of hip displasia and some neurological problems, her left rear leg has become unreliable. She can walk on it, but only on some surfaces and only for a few steps.

When she was younger she was incredibly energetic, a terror to anyone who knocked on our door, and the scourge of smaller animals. So it's been particularly difficult for her to put up with our efforts to help her around. And by "difficult" I mean that she thinks we're incredibly annoying, not nearly reliable enough, and hopelessly slow. For our part, both my husband and I were exhausted with the effort.

Enter Walkin' Wheels, a wheelchair designed for disabled pets. It took us about a week to get Muttley to use hers, but the training effort paid off, and now she loves her wheels and relies on them. Every day her walks become a little longer. But don't take my word for it: just check out this video of her returning from a walk through our neighborhood. She's starting to get a little tired, but some of her enthusiasm still shows:

Raspberry Crepes for Breakfast

Some very kind friends recently gave us some raspberry bushes. We thought it was a single bush, but turns out they gave us several. We mistakenly planted them all in one little space, but miraculously the bushes nevertheless keep producing berries. They produced an earlier crop during regular raspberry season, and now they've produced another bunch of unexpected and so therefore doubly appreciated berries.

I picked the bunch you see just above and put them in a crepe for breakfast. I still had some whipped cream left from the banana nutella crepes, so I put that in too, making it delicious and probably too sweet for breakfast. But somehow I soldiered on and ate them anyway.

Rose City Rollers Number 3 in the West

We had a great time watching the Rose City Rollers all-star team, the Wheels of Justice, compete with Duke City's Munecas Muertas this Saturday night in Portland. Above you see Miss Behavin' carrying the flag for the singing of the Star Spangled Banner at the beginning of the game in which Portland defeated the New Mexico team 154 to 69. RCR particularly dominated the ring in the first half.

Watching the Wheels of Justice defense made it easy to see how these women pushed their way to number three in the regional rankings. I'm acquainted with many of the best blockers from their usual roles as jammers on other Rose City Rollers teams, so I was surprised at how well they came together to form a tight defensive network. Typically, one or two blockers would move to freeze out Duke City, Duke City would get around one or both, only to be instantly confronted with another Rose City Roller who appeared as if from nowhere. In the first half, Duke City could barely get their talented jammers through to score even a few points.

Of course the Rose City jammers were excellent too, particularly Scratcher in the Eye, from our favorite team the Heartless Heathers, Rhea DeRange, and White Flight. Below you see the two jammers lined up for the game's first jam. That's Kamikaze Kim from Duke City in the green, and Rhea DeRange from Rose City in the black and purple.

Banana Nutella Crepes

Dessert expert Gale Gand's new cookbook, "Gale Gand's Brunch!: 100 Fantastic Recipes for the Weekend's Best Meal" is so good that I should return it to the library as soon as possible, before I'm tempted to cook again.

Now I don't want to mislead you. In spite of Chef Gand's expertise with sugar, this is a brunch book, and many of the recipes are not sweet. However, the recipe I chose to make this weekend, the banana nutella crepes, are so full of sugary, chocolaty goodness that I served them as an after-dinner dessert. I also made the nutella, a blend of roasted hazelnuts and chocolate, from scratch, using another recipe in the book.

You can see the consequences below. You'll want to put a less nutella and more bananas and whipped cream on your crepe, and certainly make them thinner. In fact, that's the way I made the rest of the batch, but this particular crepe looked best in the picture, probably because the eye always wants more nutella than the stomach can reasonably be expected to digest.

Pancake Breakfast

I got this excellent recipe for multi-grain pancakes out of Pam Anderson's recent cookbook The Perfect Recipe for Losing Weight and Eating Great. The pancakes have a mix of all-purpose flour, cornmeal, oatmeal, and whole wheat flour yet manage to taste so good I could eat them every day. I do wonder, however, how I'm supposed to lose weight eating food that tastes this good, even if it is good for me. But I am counting on these excellent pancakes to save my arteries (note that the butter in the picture is faux) from my sudden obsession with omelets.

Omelet Evolution II

A big improvement over my last omelet, this actually tasted like a real French omelet. Sporting a delicate texture on the outside, it was somewhat creamy inside. I achieved the improvement by turning the heat down slightly and stirring in a spiral fashion from the outside toward the middle. The spiral stir made it so that the middle, which is the last part to cook through, is stirred last, and I think that's how Jacques does it (time to study the video again).

You can see the only problems in this picture: it stuck to the pan, and the process of working it loose made it a little ragged. Very likely I overcompensated for the excess of butter last time by not using enough this time, and that caused the sticking.

However, while my omelet skills seem to be improving, I have to work to make sure that my health doesn't take off in the opposite direction. As I attempt to improve, I've vowed to eat omelets only once a week and ideally no more than twice. Once I've become practiced enough to create a good-looking omelet without added ingredients, I also plan to fill them with copious amounts of vegetables. I hope these precautions prove adequate, but I'll alert you if my weight or my blood cholesterol suddenly spike upward.

Diet for Canine Cushings: natural vs. commercial pet food

If your dog has Cushings, there are several sources for dietary information on the Internet recommending that you abandon commercial dog food in favor of home prepared meals. I'm writing this because I want other pet owners to know that while this can work very well for your pet, under certain circumstances you need to stick to commercial pet food.

At the time we discovered that our dog Muttley has Cushings, we switched her over to home-prepared pet food. I tried to follow the advice from VetInfo.com in particular, since they seem to be the only authoritative source that also manages to explain the bias of their information:

"The only dietary recommendations I can find are in Small Animal Clinical Nutrition III by Morris, et. al. It says to feed a high protein, low fiber, low fat, low purine diet. It suggests that it is important not to oversupplement calcium. It is also important to make sure potassium levels are adequate and that sodium is not restricted in any way if mitotane (o'p'DDD) is being used to treat the hyperadrenocorticism. Also, it is important not to restrict water intake, as you might imagine. Feeding Hill's i/d diet is one way to meet the requirements for these things. One of the book's authors is the son of the veterinarian who founded Hill's, so there may be a little bias in the recommendations, at least as to the recommended diet."

As per their advice, I stuck as strictly as possible to low-purine, high-protein foods when preparing her meals, and the results were fairly immediate and impressive. Muttley was more alert, and more importantly her thirst and subsequent urination problems were reduced to a manageable level. Since we were in the process of waiting for a complete diagnosis (adrenal vs. pituitary Cushings) and then for a prescription for trilostane which is only available in our area through the mail, we were lucky that the home-made food worked so well. In the meantime, needless to say, she loved that food, and so did our other dogs.

However, Muttley, like many Cushings sufferers, is an older dog, and her health is delicate. We've found out through trial and error that the home-made food causes harmful side effects. She's had several bouts with both diarrhea and constipation, which can be very problematic for any senior animal, but which proved especially difficult for her, given her mobility problems. I'm sure there must be some way to give her exactly the amount of fiber she needs naturally. However, I didn't realize that by attempting to adjust the amount to suit her - and I tried a couple of times to get it right - I was essentially treating her as a lab experiment, and she's in no shape for that.

The solution was to put her back on straight kibble, to which I add some chicken stock (either strained home-made chicken stock or low-fat, low-sodium canned chicken stock) for flavor. We did, however, switch from the less costly Purina One to Natural Choice, Large Breed Adult, from Nutro. It seems to be worth the high price, because it returned Muttley to normal in about one day. And we know it's the Natural Choice that made the difference because of my failed attempts to make the home-made food work for her; each time, the return to kibble fixed the problem.

In general, home-prepared dog food is probably more nutritious, and if you've got the time to prepare it and a dog who responds well to it, I would recommend it over manufactured dog food any day. But if your dog is older, in fragile health, or under treatment for Cushings, and you find that home-prepared foods are causing her digestive or intestinal problems, you should feed her instead the best manufactured kibble you can find. Remember that dog food manufacturers do have the scientific knowledge to supply all your dogs minimal nutritional requirements and provide them with the correct level of fiber, and that can make all the difference.