“What’s ‘taters’ precious?” Gollum asked.

What’s ‘taters’, eh?”, Sam responded, “PO-TA-TOES!  Boil em’, mash em’, stick em’ in a stew.” (J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers.)

Poor Samwise, his mind is limited.  There are SO many more things you can do with potatoes!

Since Sampson was diagnosed with another lick granuloma, he’s been on a mess of pills.  Two antibiotics twice a day, two nerve blockers twice a day and a pro-biotic twice a day.   Getting him to take the pills in the evening is easy, he gets ground food and the pills get mixed in.  99 out of 100 times he eats them, on the rare occasions that he doesn’t, I put a bit of yogurt or a raw egg in his bowl on top of the pill and problem solved.

His breakfast is another story entirely.

In the mornings he gets chicken necks and no matter how I arrange them, there’s just no way to hide his pills.  Typically I use peanut butter, to shove the pills in, but I ran out.  So I used sun butter instead, but yesterday morning after one set of pills I ran out of that too.  I had quite a dilemma on my hands.

I dug frantically in the refrigerator, but couldn’t find anything to hide some pills in….until my eyes fell upon the left over boiled salt potatoes.

Why not, I thought.

It was a bit on the thick side, which was exactly how I wanted it.

It ended up being about the size of a small cocktail meatball.

To sum it up, here’s what I did.

1/2 cup boiled salt potatoes

1 to 2 tablespoons of sour cream

Fork mash the potatoes and add sour cream to the required consistency.  It’s that easy. 🙂

WHAT?  Are you saying you don’t know what boiled salt potatoes are?   Holy snap!  They are so easy and so yummy that I normally want to lick my plate.

Okay, okay here’s how you make boiled salt potatoes.

What you need, red potatoes (leave the skin on) salt, butter.

Quarter the potatoes (unless they’re huge, then cut them into decent sized chunks.  I’d say about an inch if you can manage it.)  Cover with cold water and add about 1/4 cup of salt for every 3 or 4 medium sized potatoes.  Cook until they are tender, but not too much, you don’t want these babies disintegrating.

Once they’re tender, drain the potatoes and place them back in the pan, with about 1/2 a stick of butter for every 3 or 4 medium sized potatoes  (this is key, you will not get the same results if you use margarine or Brummel or any other type of butter replacement.)  Once the butter has melted, give them a stir and then shove those suckers into your mouth as fast as you can.

You may want to wear some loose clothes too, because if they’re anywhere near as popular at your house as they are at mine, you might have to wrestle someone for seconds and that’s hard to do in tight pants.

Have you ever had to be creative in getting pills into your pet?  What are your secrets?

If you’d like some great recipe ideas for dog treats, head on over to Kol’s Notes, Koly’s Mama always has something tasty on the menu, today it’s Autumn Gold Gluten Free Dog Treats.  And this is the Tasty Tuesday blog hop hosted by Kol’s Notes and Sugar the Golden Retriever.