Review, Giveaway & Recipe

Hi all! Petal here! We have a treat review to share today and I told Mom that since I’m the one who taste tests them, I should be the one to write the review. She agreed.

Chewy.com sent me some tasty treats from a company called Fromm. They make all dry foods, canned foods and treats for us dogs. They make cat food too, but who cares about cats. All their foods and treats are made in the USA! Me and Mom have heard lots of good things about them, but we’ve never tried them before now.

Chewy sent me my very own 6 oz baggie of Fromm treats. They even put my name on the box. Says right here it’s for Petal.

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They only put Mom’s name on it so she wouldn’t feel left out. They’re considerate folks at Chewy.

First things first when you get a package you gotta open it! My second favorite part!

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My very favorite part is finding what lies inside. I have to say, I was very bewildered by these treats at first. My Mom thought it was funny, apparently she requested this flavor just to confuse me! There’s a word for that and it’s R-U-D-E (because Mom won’t let me use strong language, something about being a family friendly blog).

Now Mom insists on relaying the whole embarrassing conversation I had with her out in the yard…

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Don’t laugh guys. I didn’t want to eat some strange cranberry hybrid’s liver. I didn’t see the comma in these here ingredients:

Wheat flour, cranberry COMMA liver, salt, garlic powder.

That’s it! According to the ingredient list on Chewy.com, the liver is chicken liver.

My Our (Mom just insists on being included) favorite things about these treats:

Low calorie (just 1 calorie per treat!) (this is obviously MOM’S favorite thing)
They’re made in Wisconsin with Wisconsin cranberries
They’re made with delicious liver (my favorite thing, Mom says “ick”)
They’re bite sized (about the size of a quarter) and perfect for training
They’re a fair price
They don’t stink and they don’t make Mom’s hands smelly

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Things to consider:

They’re a crunchy treat, not a soft one, so if you’re looking for a soft training treat, this is not it.
The actual bag does not state what animal the liver is sourced from, so I’m just assuming that Chewy is correct and it’s chicken liver; the only reason I’m pointing this out is because I know some dogs are sensitive to certain meat sources, so sensitive doggies should be aware of that.

Chewy.com is also hosting a giveaway! There will be first, second, and third place winners. You can enter to win using the Rafflecopter below. Good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

(if the Rafflecopter widget doesn’t show up, just click the link. Sometimes it shows up for me and sometimes it doesn’t, I don’t know why. Sorry!)

 

Time to turn the blog back over to Mom, she has a treat recipe she wants to share with you all.

XOXO Petal

 

Last night I whipped up some dog cookies for Petal and I thought I would share the haphazard recipe with you all. Now I’m just guessing with these measurements because, uh, I rarely measure my ingredients when it comes to dog cookies. Measuring stuff = having to wash the measuring cups. Um, no thanks.

Here we go. Petal’s Fish and Fruit Cookies.

You will need:

 

About 2 1/2 or 3 cups of the flour of your choice (I used wheat and the last of the coconut flour that we had, but I know a lot of you pups have wheat allergies, so use whatever floats your boat!)

1/4 cup canned pumpkin (plain pumpkin. Nothin’ but pumpkin)

1/2 cup (about) Cranberries

1 cup..ish Pineapple chunks

Salmon oil

a few pinches of Parsley (I used fresh parsley because I had it on hand and it needed to be used)

Preheat your oven to 350º.
Throw the cranberries, pineapple chunks and parsley (if using fresh) in a blender with either water or the pineapple juice if using canned pineapple and puree well. Pour it into a mixing bowl with the flour and salmon oil (I used 4 pumps of Grizzly Salmon oil, but feel free to substitute or skip the oil all together or, if you have some canned salmon on hand, puree it and use that (I plan on doing this next time)) and mix well, adding more flour or more water as needed to make a good dough. Too sticky? You need more flour. Too hard and dry? You need more water.

Roll the dough out and cut with cookie cutters or use a pizza slicer to make squares (I used the pizza slicer because we didn’t have any cookie cutters small enough for what I wanted (bite sized cookies)). Place cookies on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper and bake. I baked mine at 350º for about 20 minutes before lowing the heat to about 200º, at which point I just peeked at them every so often and gave them a little poke. Once they felt a little bit crunchy, I turned the oven off and left the cookies in over night to cool.

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Have you ever seen an uglier batch of cookies? This is what happens when I’m too tired to roll the dough out nicely. It also helped that I used our poor, lame pizza slicer too slice them. Our pizza slicer is so incredibly bent that it can no longer go in a straight line, it swerves and wobbles pathetically. Our pizzas’ look just as pretty.

This morning the cookies were nice and cold and I broke them apart easily and dumped them into Petal’s cookie jar. The cookies on the outer edges were nice and crunchy while the middle pieces were softer and chewy. They also smelled really good, very fruity, if there wasn’t salmon oil in them I would taste them, but I think the salmon oil would add a weird taste that I would not enjoy. Petal seems to love them though!

Today we’re linking up with the Tasty Tuesday Blog Hop hosted by Kol’s Notes and Sugar the Golden Retriever. Check out either blog for more info and the rules of the hop. If the hop does not show up below (the hop and the Rafflecopter are teaming up to drive me crazy), you can enter it at either Kol’s blog or Sugar’s blog.

Bits and pieces + We have a Winner!

We have a winner for our Vitacost $25 gift card giveaway!
Our winner is…

Dachshund Nola!
Congrats Nola!
I know I said I would have the winner email me, but since I have your email, I went ahead and emailed you. 😉
Thank you to everyone who entered!

Now for a few other things…
pet-ambassador
Earlier this week we had the pleasure of being featured on Healthy Paws blog!
We wrote up some of our favorite activities to do together for their “8 Active Pet Parents.” article.
You can read it here, if you’re interested, you may even recognize a few other dogs/blogs there!
https://www.healthypawspetinsurance.com/blog/2013/06/11/pet-activities/

We have a visitor…
Guess who arrived here just a few hours ago?
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(excuse the crappy iPhone picture, I knew that if I got up to get the Canon, Pepper would follow and I would miss getting this picture)

Petal’s friend Pepper!
For the next 3 weeks we will have a Petal, Penny and Pepper in the house.
Oh yeah, and Pancake the cat who often goes by Panny.
Petal, Pepper, Penny, and Panny.
Yikes. I’m getting tongue tied already.
Should be fun though!

Hope you all are having a great weekend!

Review & Giveaway: Happytails Spa from Vitacost.com

Today we are reviewing the services of Vitacost.com and two of the products they have to offer: Happytails Spa’s Sleepytime Tonic and Happytails Spa’s Fur Butter.

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Vitacost.com is an online store where you can buy discount vitamins and other health care supplies for yourself and your pet! They have a large variety of brands to offer and excellent customer service.
Our package arrived in an adequate amount of time and the box it came in even had a recipe for gluten free cookies on it, neat! However, it was a rather large box for the two little items I had and they were both just freely rolling around in it. Both my items were in good shape regardless, nothing broken and nothing open. When I asked them about it, I was assured that they otherwise package their products very well.

Vitacost.com is easy to navigate, they have a large variety of brands to choose from and great prices.

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(image source: Happytails Spa)

Now we are already long time fans of the Happytails Spa products, especially their Fur Butter, a deep conditioner. That stuff is pure magic for Lassie and Petal’s coats.
As you probably know, Petal recently had a bath. She was covered in dirt and debris from outside. Like foxtails, dreaded foxtails. We really hate those itchy, sharp little nasties. In the past I’ve never really used the Fur Butter on Petal, who is already fairly easy to brush, but this last bath I did. While she did not enjoy standing in the tub for ten minutes while it worked it’s magic (for best results, you must leave the Fur Butter in their fur for 5-10 minutes before rinsing, and it really does make a difference), I however greatly enjoyed that the Fur Butter did some of the work for me. The majority of the foxtails rinsed right out of her fur as I rinsed out the Fur Butter and what remained was easily brushed out as I blow dried her. So much easier than usual.
I’ve already been a long time lover of Fur Butter when it comes to Lassie. It makes him so soft and so much easier to brush. It’s amazing for any stubborn tangles. Love it, love it, love it.

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Lassie after yesterday’s bath.

Being a conditioner it doesn’t suds up as you rub it in, but you can feel it, so it’s easy to feel where you have and haven’t applied it. As you rinse it out, it suds/bubbles up a bit which is really convenient for knowing where you’ve rinsed it all out and where you haven’t.
It works best on long coats, from my experience. I used it once on Ella and while it did make her a tad softer, it felt pointless to use it on her short coat. I never use it on her again and I wouldn’t use it on Penny, simply because there is no real need.
While it smells amazing while using it, the scent seems to get rinsed out for the most part. But at least it smelled great while you worked and my dogs do smell good afterwards, just not as great as, let’s say, opening the container and taking a whiff (yes, I have been know to do this often. It smells incredible, okay? ;P).

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While I’ve been a fan of Fur Butter for awhile, I had never tried the Sleepytime Tonic before now.
Sleepytime Tonic is a herbal remedy made to calm nervous, anxious or over active dogs without making them sleepy. I’ve looked into it many times for Lassie’s fear of thunder and fireworks and for Ella’s general nervousness, but I never got around to actually buying a bottle of it. So I was pretty excited to finally try this stuff. Especially since Penny has put Ella to shame as far as the constant nervous energy goes.
Penny goes bonkers whenever it’s feeding time. For anyone. The cats, the humans, but especially when it’s her own feeding time. She literally screams and cries and barks. We have to put her in a crate while we dish the food out or else she’ll just go crazy running and pacing and jumping anxiously around the family room. I thought with time she would get over it, and maybe she still will, but she has been with us for months now and there was no improvement before Sleepytime Tonic. I’ve noticed some improvement since using it.
Sleepytime Tonic can be used twice daily or as needed. Penny has been getting it twice daily for past three weeks (tomorrow will mark 3 weeks). Petal gets some only when she needs it. The amount you give is based on the weight of your dog.
It seems to work best if I give it to Penny 20-30 minutes before feedings, directly in her mouth. Luckily she will eat anything, so she happily allows me to squirt some in her mouth with the dropper. At first I was hiding it in her food, thinking that would be easier, but as the bottle says, it does work best if put directly in their mouth.
Penny still cries at feeding time, but it’s not as bad and her frenzy is not as intense. I went a weekend without it just to see and I noticed she was much more tense and desperate. 
I know I’ve mentioned before that Petal has a fear of popping gum and my sister has a gum popping addiction. Not a great combo. Petal paces, pants, and crawls on top of or behind me or any place she feels she can hide. I was really hoping Sleepytime Tonic would help her with this. She won’t happily take it like Penny will, but she doesn’t fight me when I lift her lip and squirt it in her mouth. Before I would hide her under a blanket and rub her, which would sometimes help. That combined with the Sleepytime Tonic was excellent. It worked so well and pretty quickly too. I was very happy with the results and as the bottle says, it didn’t put her or Penny to sleep. It just aided in calming them down.

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“She’s lying. Nothing scares me.”

I didn’t get a chance to try it on Lassie (no thunder or fireworks since the arrival of Sleepytime Tonic), but I think it may be just the trick.

While Sleepytime Tonic wasn’t the cure-all for Penny (I wasn’t expecting it to be either) it has helped. As for Petal, it has helped her a lot, which I am very grateful for!

Overall, I give Vitacost.com 4 1/2 out of 5 hearts for their easy to navigate website, great prices and their kind customer service. I docked half a point for the packaging, but only half since it seems to have been just a fluke.
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I give Fur Butter a million 5 hearts for effectiveness (and it’s incredible scent ;)).
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And 4 hearts for Sleepytime Tonic’s effectiveness.
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Now how about a giveaway?
Interested in getting some great products from Vitacost? Maybe your pooch is in need of some shampoo or treats. Or maybe you’re in need for some health care products. Whatever your need may be, you can enter to win a $25 gift card for Vitacost.com!
The winner will be announced here on the blog within 48 hours after the giveaway ends, so be sure to check back! This giveaway is open to US residents only. You only have to do the two mandatory things to enter. The others are all optional, but they will earn you more entries if you do them.
Enter here to win!
a Rafflecopter giveaway

Good luck! 😉

Discloser: I was sent 1 (one) bottle of Sleepytime Tonic and 1 (one) container of Fur Butter, free of charge, from Vitacost in exchange for an honest review. I was not otherwise compensated for this review. All opinions expressed here are my own and based on my experience with the products and with Vitacost.