Hey Jen! I really enjoy home cooking. I have some recipes in the Caring for your Cavalier part of the Library too, and I have a B-Naturals newsletters posted there from a while back that had recipes for home-cooked. I tend to make stews of various sorts, or about half a meal might be fresh food additions to a good kibble.
I like variety so I rotate the protein source between hamburger to chicken (I boil a whole one but then you have to make very sure you get all the small bones out -- it gets kind of hands on squishy doing that but kind of fun and regressive :lol:. Or easier yet, I get a whole turkey leg at the butcher and boil that with veggie additions; fewer bones to take out but remove the skin as that can cause problems for dogs. You could use other meats too.
For their current stew -- enough to feed all three for about a week, longer if used with kibble; and costing me about $10-12 total to make -- I did this:
Put one large chicken in a cooking pot, cover to several inches with water. Bring to boil then simmer for two hours or so.
Add in one bag fresh kale, chopped roughly, and 3-4 large carrots, chopped. Cook another hour.
Add in a cup or two of rolled oats and cook another 30 minutes or so.
Take a couple of pieces of liver (in this case, lamb, but normally I'd have chicken to go with chicken), fry gently or poach in some water, then chop and add to the stew.
Let it all cool overnight.
In morning when cool, work hands through the stew to remove all bones (I actually enjoy this but if people don;t, get a protein source without so many bones!
You have to do this carefully and thoroughly as there are lots of small bones on a chicken.
Package into tubs and freeze what you won't use within three days. I use empty plastic ice cream and peanut butter tubs (bulk size from the health food store).
You could also have added barley or rice instead of oats, or a combination, or any range of other vegetables. I often add peppers, broccoli, green beans or frozen mixed vegetables. If stuff is on sale I will buy that. With a big freezer you could easily do two weeks of meals.
Some days I feed with kibble, some days on its own. As Caraline says it is useful to get a couple of books that advise on balancing out the diet. Monica Segal does one and also has small booklets or you can select a choice of the book and three pamphlets for example.
www.monicasegal.com. It is good to keep in mind that just adding supplements haphazardly can be a bad idea -- because some foods will cancel or amplify the supplements and some supplements will do this to other supplements so if the same thing and same supplements are always fed without understanding how this works, you could be denying a dog nutrients that it needs (obviously rotating things around avoids this as does caution with supplements). Monica is good on this kind of info I think. But I tend to believe you shouldn't need to be adding a lot of supplements to a nice varied fresh diet anyway! It's just that you ened to know what is generally a good choice for the base diet.