Need help with home prepared diet!

K ... I can not find a dog food that I like that I can afford, SO with my dogs being smaller breeds ... I am making my own. However, I need to get some help in making a good recipe that I can use and freeze. Also in figuring out how much the dogs needs. My larger dog is a beagle mix that is a whopping 21lbs and is active in spurts. The smaller dog is a rat terrier mix and is about 10lbs but SUPER active. So, I have been pureeing liver, veggies, and some baby food fruits and serving it with rice. The kids are currently using 1/2 c of the rice and then 1/2 c of the mixture. But my larger dog is getting fat. So now I am trying to figure out a good mix for them. Thanks!

Not much help this I know as I do not feed home cooked, there are a couple of people on here who do so I'm sure they will be along soon with good advice but just wanted to say that feeding a good quality kibble is not always actually expensive. They often require less of it than other commercial foods due to the quality and ingredients.

Just as an example I feed my dog on Fish4Dogs:

Salmon, Potato, Fish Meal, Salmon Oil, Beet Fibre, Brewers Yeast , Minerals.

Crude Protein 26%; Fat Content 12%; Crude Ash 9%; Crude Fibres 2.5%

It is around 55% fish. My dog weighs 13kg (28lbs) and costs me £3 ($4.80) to feed per week which I think is pretty cheap. I pay £37 ($59) for 12kg but it lasts 3 months as she does not require much.

You may find this thread useful about home cooked diets: http://www.dogsey.com/showthread.php?t=158255

and maybe this thread about what people feed and how much is costs: http://www.dogsey.com/showthread.php?t=157357

If you are balancing the ingredients correctly of your diet, your dog is healthy, and is getting sufficient exercise, and is gaining weight I would suggest he is being over fed and just cut the amount of food and up the exercise! Good luck

This site is worth a look
http://www.dogaware.com/

Rice is a filler, so I wouldn`t personally use it.
Why not just go to raw feeding? It would be a lot less hassle and no more expensive - and because you aren`t adding fillers it`s easier to calculate amounts.
Just liver as a protein source is not good. Liver should only be fed occasionally anyway. Try beef/ lamb / poultry mince instead, stop adding baby food and don`t bother pureeing.
Your dogs need some hard food in there to crunch on to clean their teeth - try poultry necks for the tinies and chicken wings for the beagle (raw)

Have you looked into homemade diets previously? This combination doesn't really sound like the best balanced diet at all. The main diet of a wolf is meat - and with domestic dogs having the same digestive system, I would say their diet should be mostly, if not all, meat-based. Veggies, baby food (which has very little nutritional value to anything other than a human baby) and rice doesn't sound like the optimum diet, and liver as a main meat isn't really suitable - you should limit to amount of liver in a dog's diet due to the amount of Vitamin A in it.
I would say go back to the drawing board and research homecooked (or perhaps even raw, as you're willing to freeze it) diets, and in the meantime, feed the most decent dry food you can afford, before you end up causing a deficiency in your dogs by feeding an unbalanced diet.

Too much liver is not good for dogs, so if your dogs are having it on a daily basis, I would advise stopping this. I would also recommend stopping the baby food.

For a home cooked diet, you want to fed a mix of meat, veg and then maybe add some brown rice or wholewheat pasta or some wheat-free pasta. Fish is also an option - tinned fish is fine but don't feed tinned tuna too often.

Have you tried any wet foods? I feed Wainwrights wet trays and I find them really good value for money.

Also the Skinners dog foods VAT free range - some very inexpensive ones there.

Also CSJ - very affordable and worth checking out.

I also give one home cooked meal a day, some examples are:

Brown rice mixed with a tin of sardines or other fish

Scrambled eggs

Wholewheat pasta and cottage cheese

Tabitha, OP looks to be in the USA so CSJ etc. is probably not available over there.

Ah, thanks, didn't realise

The reason your Beagle mix is putting on weight is due to his being given much too much rice.

Feeding a dog a well balanced home cooked diet is not much different to feeding a young child. You wouldn't dream of feeding a two year old child on pureed liver and rice everyday????

A typical meal for my 37lb Pei and 9.5lb Tibbie would be ...

Chicken, Tripe and Heart all lightly cooked then cut into bite size pieces plus
potatoes, carrots, green beans and spinach cooked until "al dente" in the stock used for the meat, then pureed ..... which ensures the dog is getting the maximum nutritional value from them.

There's a very good article about the various methods of feeding on: http://www.infopet.co.uk/pages/0131.hmtl

Not sure there's a comparison to be made there. I wouldn't feed a two year old child on raw meat and bones, or a good quality dog kibble, either