Required field must not be blank: August 2017

Thursday, August 31, 2017

Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Sunday, August 27, 2017

Bird Cookie Recipe Number Three

This recipe for a healthy bird treat was pretty successful. All the birds liked it.

2 mashed bananas
6 tablespoons flax seeds, millet and chia seeds soaked in water
3/4 cup buckwheat flour
1/4 cup whole wheat flour
4 tablespoons-ish of dried vegetables (I ran the the birds usually mixture of broccoli, kale, squash, etc through a food dehydrator)
4 tablespoons of brown rice
1 egg

All this gets mixed and mashed together...

...formed into pancakes and fried in coconut oil.

Coconut oil has a low flash point so the temperature had to be kept low. Cooking goes slowly...

The results are a pretty good banana thingy that everyone liked!

I topped some with cinnamon, and some with crushed cornflakes.

The birds have never eaten banana, plain, they just don't like it. But these were a heathly hit!

Saturday, August 26, 2017

Feeding Birds (And Us) Pasta

Awhile ago we got a spiralizer. This photo shows what it does to zucchini.

I really like the idea of coming up with food that we all, humans and birds, can eat. This is a lot easier than one might think. A parrot's diet is an extremely healthy one.

Mix this up and cook with some ordinary pasta and you have the basis for a good meal for both humans and birds.

We seasoned ours with oil and garlic, but set some aside plain for the birds.

This stuff was a hit. All the birds liked the pasta, and Harlan really like the long strands of zucchini. This is funny because he eats zucchini all the time, chopped, and it's just sort of ho-hum. But in long spirals, it's like a whole new food!

More Bird Food

Here's another attempt at a bird food... This is a sort of bird salsa. We thought we'd freeze it in single serving pieces as a more convenient way of getting the morning feedings done.

Basically, this is just an assortment of vegetables, including some hot pepper (yes, bird like hot peppers).

We mashed it all up in food processor and filled muffin tins, which then went into the freezer. I was hoping one could be thawed out in the morning for the day.

These weren't a big hit.

I think the birds, Ed, Olive and Harlan, all like their vegetables in bigger chunks. As far as the hot peppers go (and by the way, this stuff was really hot), they all ate it but only Ed really seemed to go for the hot.

Bird Cookies Number One

This was our first attempt at baking up something for the birds. These turned out to be a sort of cookie that were actually pretty tasty (or at least we thought so).

1 cup quinoa, cooked
1/2 cup walnuts, crushed
1/2 cup mixture of buckwheat flour, hemp seeds and flax seeds
1/4 cup raisins
1 egg

Basically, we just ground up and mixed all the dry ingredients and kneaded in the egg.

It was flattened out and baked in a pan like a cookie; 300 degrees for 20 minutes (or more). Unfortunately I couldn't find any photos of the final result.