Bird Cookies Number 5

This bird treat is similar to this one, with a couple variations.

First, instead a mix of several vegetables, I dehydrated a bunch of kale and used that only. All our bird love kale. And second, instead of banana, I used a smallish to medium sweet potato, cooked.

Oh, and I ground up all the seeds almost to a butter.

So...

1 sweet potato
6 tablespoons flax, chia and hulled hemp seeds ground almost to a paste
3/4 cup buckwheat flour
1/4 cup whole wheat flour
4 tablespoons-ish of dried kale, crumbled up
4 tablespoons of cooked brown rice
1 egg
Cinnamon to taste

I microwaved the sweet potato, 4-5 minutes (poke hole with a fork first), removed the skin and cut it up into very small pieces.

No fancy process. The dry ingredients, egg, cooked rice, and all just get mixed together into a dough. This takes awhile, to mash the sweet potato mostly. I used a big spoon, but a food processor could probably do it faster.

I added some cinnamon last and mixed it in, about a tsp I think.

I made the dough into balls about one inch and fried them in coconut oil. The cooking is slow because you can't heat coconut oil much before it burns and probably sets off your smoke alarm. Use heat significantly lower than you would for olive oil or butter. I set the burner on our stove to 3 to 4. Your mileage may vary.

While frying I flattened the balls into thin patties, as thin as I could.

 All done! With left over rice...

These cookies received 6 wing up, bird approved by Ed, Olive and Harlan.

(Humans seem to like them too)

Another Bird Treat Recipe

Ed the cockatiel likes Wheat Thins. A lot.

In fact he knows the word, and he recognizes the yellow box. Nothing will get Ed to do what you want him to faster than a Wheat Thin.

If you look at the box, Wheat Thins are not an awful treat for a bird. Yes, there's probably too much salt, and fat, and other things. But they are a quite simple snack, with very few ingredients.

It would be nice if we could give him something like Wheat Thins that were better for him.

The internet is loaded with sites about creating good imitations of pre-packaged foods at home. It seems to be a hobby for a lot of people. It was easy to find several recipes for making your our Wheat Thins. I read a few and came up with the following interpretation.

1 1/4 cups whole wheat flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon paprika
4 tablespoons of coconut oil
A bit of flax and millet seed to sprinkle on top

This is close to what you'll find online, but with reduced salt, no sugar, and coconut oil instead of butter.

Combine the flour, sugar, salt, paprika and butter in a food processor, pulsing until the oil is evenly disbursed in the crumbs. Slowly add 1/4 cup of water and mix until the mixture begins to form a dough ball.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Spread the dough on to parchment paper.

Simple.

But next comes the part we learned is really tricky and the critical step in getting something like a cracker.

The dough has to be spread thin, really, really thin. Spread it as thin as you possibly can.

Not thin enough - make it thinner.

We used a stone rolling pin and dusted with more whole wheat flour. It has to be really, really thin,

Then cut the (thin) sheet of dough into squares, like, you know, Wheat Thins.

We then scattered a little flax and millet on top and pressed that it.

The cook time will depend on how thin you get the dough. Ours took about 10 minutes. I'd set the timer for 6 first and start checking then each 1 or 2 minutes after that.

If they are really thin, they will get crispy fast. The exact cook time seems pretty critical.

Did Ed approve? He did. But truth be told he liked these about as much as he liked the "healthy" version of Wheat Thins we got at Whole Foods once.

He liked them, but they weren't the same. They're good, and easy to make,  crackers though. We ate most of them ourselves I think.

Try this, for your birds, or just for yourself. It was quick and easy, and they did taste remarkably like a very low salt wheat Thin.

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!

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.

These were a partial success. All the birds ate them but weren't thrilled.