Why Did I Choose Homemade Healthy Dog Food?

So I've making been my own homemade healthy dog food now for about 1 month. My reasons for even trying it were two-fold. First, the cost of dog food. Second, our new dog's itching and scratching.

We had just adopted an 11 month old Mastiff, Stella. Some of our instructions were to feed her 8 cups of dog food a day! We already have a Catahoula Leopard dog (a herding dog) who got 1-1/2 cups of food a day. Needless to say we went through the normal 18 lb bag of puppy food in less than 2 weeks. And that was just from Stella.

Another of our instructions were to bath her regularly with a special shampoo because she had dog itchy skin. The problem with that - she doesn't really likes baths!

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Flashback......
Let's go back almost two years ago when we rescued the Catahoula, named Shadow. He had very bad itching also. Thinking back now, it was probably worse than Stella's. Not knowing then about the "evils" of commercial dog foods, I looked in the pet stores for something to help Shadow's itching. I found a liquid supplement to add to his food, which I did and the itching gradually stopped by around 3 weeks! As long as I added this supplement, no itching. I've run out a couple of times and thought "he's better now - he doesn't need this anymore". And the itching would come back within a week.

Now I just assumed the problem was within my dog - for some reason he just needed this "extra". I never made the connection in my mind that the reason I had to add this supplement was because it just wasn't provided in his commercial dog food. Now I wasn't buying the most or least expensive dog food - it was middle ground. And it was a name brand that I associated with "good health". I thought I was doing good for my dog.
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Back to the present.....
So I started researching on the web how to make your own dog food and got scared! I've got two kids already. How much time is it going to consume in my already busy day to make homemade healthy dog food?

I downloaded an e-book which helped with the millions of questions I had. I'll be honest, the first few weeks, I did spend quite a bit of prep time, but I've honed it down quite a bit and developed some of my own shortcuts. I'll post some of these later. A lot of them come from combining things I've watched and read about homemade healthy dog food - nothing in my mind as original, but when you are first starting, every little thing helps.