RECIPE: Banana Buttons

Everybody loves a little bite of something sweet sometimes, and dogs are no exception. Our family had a much-loved Jack Russell terrier named Wimzie who once sneakily climbed onto the coffee table and consumed my daughter Megan's entire Easter basket of jellybeans with no lasting ill effects, but that's definitely not the kind of treat I'd recommend for a dog. For one thing, that kind of candy will stick their teeth together something awful, and for another thing, I'm thinking that most brands of jellybeans probably contain Allergic Dogs' Enemy #1  -- corn -- in the form of high fructose corn syrup. Ugh.

So! Banana Buttons! Zuzu, Dobby and Izzy love them and they're really easy to make. You can be the judge of how big to make them according to your pet's size and weight - check out the size of the treat in relation to my hand (sorry about the blurry pic.) For small dogs like our three, a "button" is all the bigger this treat needs to be, especially since these goodies are sweet!

Ingredients:
2 cups old-fashioned oats
1 cup rice cereal for infants
2 overripe bananas, mashed
2 eggs
1 tablespoon oil (I recommend coconut, light olive or canola oils - read the label to MAKE SURE your oil is not a blend that contains corn or soy)
1 tablespoon honey
Approximately 1/4 cup of milk, just enough to moisten the batter into a dough that you can roll between your palms

Directions:
1. Pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees.  

2. Whir the old-fashioned oats and infant rice cereal in a food processor until they're milled into flour. Add the bananas, eggs, oil and honey and process until smooth, adding milk as needed to make a dough. If you add too much milk, just throw in a little more infant rice cereal, no problem. It's not like you're going to serve these to your mother-in-law. (Or are you, you naughty thing?) Turn the dough out and either pinch off small pieces to roll into balls, or if you want to be fancy, you can roll out the dough on a flat surface with a rolling pin and cut it into shapes with cute doggy cookie cutters.

3. Bake the treats at 350 degrees for fifteen minutes on a baking sheet that has been lightly spritzed with cooking spray. Remove from baking sheet and cool completely on wire racks. If you don't cool them completely, there is a chance that your lovingly baked treats will end up moldy.

4. These dog treats contain NO PRESERVATIVES, so they must be refrigerated. Store them in the fridge in an airtight container for up to a week.

5. These treats are made from people food and they kind of look like people food, so make sure the fam knows that these Banana Buttons are for the pooch. We had....an incident...here at our house involving some cookies that made my husband remark, "These are okay, but did you forget to put in the sugar?" as he crunched his way through a handful. Oh dear....