When you’ve been unemployed as long as I have, sometimes your mind goes to dark places. My mind went straight to your mother’s cavernous ass. Actually, it’s not dark in there at all because that barn door is always wide open, but it does smell like a cheesemonger’s shop that has just caught on fire.
A thing that cheers me up is hanging out with new friends. My friend Tim from Twitter asked to have lunch with me and we ate chicken and drank sangria. Eating dead grilled chicken is a good activity that brings people together. I also ate peas, because peas are good for you. As food goes, peas are extremely adorable because they are small and green and remind me of my own wrinkly little green balls. And drinking sangria is a very good way to simulate being a lonely housewife, but you also need to abuse prescription medication to complete that simulation.
Another good activity that brings people together is visiting a pet store to decide what dog treats I should eat for this garbage website of mine. Mind you, this was the first time I met Tim, and asking him to go shopping for dog food that I was going to eat was a big step forward in our friendship. We went to Dogaholics in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago. The staff there was very nice and asked many questions about my dog.
I do not have a dog.
Early on in The Pizzle’s formative stages, I did a taste test for Purina Fancy Feast Cat Broth food. The conclusion I drew from that taste test was that I should not eat cat food for dinner while drunk. But would I react the same way to fancy dog treats for dinner? Every day I look at this website and think, “Dannis, what is wrong with you? Nobody will date you because you eat garbage and pet food.”
I started with Dogsbutter.
I mainly picked this product because I thought it meant butter made from dog’s milk, but it is actually just a special peanut butter formula made for dogs. I almost had a heart attack when I saw the price because it is $12.99. Also, I included my stuffed doggie, whose name is Potato, to observe this taste test.
Dogsbutter is not all that different from regular natural peanut butter. You have to stir the oil in that collects up top.
The interesting thing is that Dogsbutter tastes like unseasoned peanut butter except for one key fact: There’s ginger in it. I guess dogs like to eat ginger. Ginger peanut butter is not great but not terrible. If you are a dog owner that likes ginger, you can make a Dogsbutter and jelly sandwich so you can feel closer to your dog.
The next thing I tried was Ferrera Farms Naturals Freeze Dried Green Tripe. I purposely did not look up what green tripe was beforehand because I did not want to chicken out. As a professional food writer, I already know that tripe is cow stomach.
Green tripe snacks taste like grass and sweaty underwear. I am specifically talking about the part of the underwear that is touching the human perineum. They have a chewy yet crackly texture (due to the freeze-drying process) and are probably not something I would eat again. But when I am drunk I eat anything. Actually, when I’m sober too. So never say never!
I finally looked up what green tripe was, and it really is just the lining of a cow stomach. What I didn’t know was that green tripe is unbleached stomach lining, so that means whatever the cow was eating is probably still in there. That explains the grassy flavor. I also believe it is raw when it is processed so I essentially ate dried cow stomach sushi pellets. Nobody is going to kiss me ever again. Your mother and I do not kiss. It is simply not that kind of relationship.
Dogaholics has all sorts of gourmet dog food, including something they call “Mutt Macaroons.” That’s funny because one of the names I call your mother is “mutt.”
Mutt Macaroons are essentially coconut macaroons that people eat. They are made of the same types of ingredients except for the sugar. I purchased one of each (they were $1.50 a piece, ouch), including Coconut Apple Pie, Coconut Limoncello, and Coconut Vanilla Flax. As you can tell, they are shaped like large tater tots.
I would definitely eat these again. Mutt Macaroons are lightly sweetened and taste like their names suggest, like apples, lemon, and vanilla. They have a chewy and crumbly texture and are slightly reminiscent of flavored sawdust. I have had worse human food, but for $1.50 a pop my goiter almost exploded.
Dogaholics also has a beautiful display case of dog biscuits, cookies, and candies. I asked the counter lady which ones were delicious and she had some good opinions. The top left is a peanut butter tart-like item, the top right is a peanut butter and yogurt cup, and the bottom one is a regular dog biscuit with frosting on it.
The peanut butter tart is almost impossible to chew. I tried and tried and I could only get a small piece off the crust, which was bland and like particle board. I am impressed at the canine ability to chew through things like this. The center, however, is extraordinarily sweet and it has a hidden gem of peanut butter at the bottom. The black frosting, however, tastes like death. And death tastes like carob — which is something dogs can eat. If you’ve never had it, carob tastes like depressed chocolate.
The peanut butter yogurt cup is insanely sweet. If you have ever eaten a yogurt-covered raisin, imagine eating just a whole mini Reese’s Peanut Butter cup-sized candy that was just the yogurt. Jesus Christ. This thing would give any creature diabetes. You know something is sweet when even the distinct flavor of peanut is eclipsed by sugar.
The Lucky Dog biscuit does not taste lucky. It is just bland and tastes like compressed bran. If you are constipated I might recommend you eat a dog biscuit like this. It is slightly sweet and it tastes a little bit like a graham cracker but is much harder to chew. They also had dog s’mores; I should have eaten a dog s’more.
I was excited for the dog cupcake because it was so cute. Turns out I should not have been excited at all. There is no sugar in a dog cupcake. This is bullshit. The cake ingredient list includes buckwheat, brown flaxseed, chickpeas, brown lentils, split peas, purified water, peanut butter, egg, baking powder, and baking soda. This is what vegans eat, minus the egg. Eating ground up grains and seeds is why vegans are so angry all of the time.
I almost choked on it because its bland flavor was so unexpected. When people say “I wouldn’t feed this to my dog,” I would not feed this to their dog either. And it’s $4.99. That price is like a sucker punch to the balls.
I also bought a “Mini Burger.”
The Mini Burger is the size of an Oreo cookie. I tried to eat it as-is, because that’s how you give it to a dog, but my teeth couldn’t get through it. So as you see here, I let it soak for 30 minutes in very hot water.
After it rehydrated, the Mini Burger looked like a slider puck you see on a tiny cute hamburger. But it was still insanely dry and I could only wrestle off a piece of the edge. Turns out this item tastes like beef jerky that got sat on angrily by presidential candidate Chris Christie. I mean, it tasted fine, but it would not make a good salisbury steak as Tim suggested. It would make better ammunition for an assault rifle.
Now, they say “Dogs are man’s best friend.” If you feed some of these treats to your dog, maybe your dog will think you are not its best friend. But I mean, if you have a dog you are always picking up its warm poo in a plastic bag so I guess that still makes you a pretty good friend.
I do not have friends that pick up my poo, and deep inside, that makes me feel wistful.
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