Just as taking the time to cook your own meals can be healthier than eating out or eating a meal that comes in a box, making your own dog food recipes is a way to both add variety to your pet’s diet and have more control about what goes into your dog’s body. And although making your own dog food recipes can result in a happy, healthy canine who doesn’t have a lot of artificial flavors or preservatives, there’s also the potential for missteps if you add the wrong foods. If you’re starting to cook your own dog food recipes, here are some foods to avoid:

Chocolate

One of the most commonly known things to avoid feeding dogs, you should never add this food to any dog food recipes. The substance theobromine, which occurs naturally in chocolate, is toxic to dogs. While the concentration of theobromine varies in chocolate, with milk chocolate containing the least and baker’s chocolate the most. In any case, avoid chocolate in dog food recipes.

Onions

Onions, though they make great flavoring for both human and dog food recipes, can lead to a condition called Heinz body anemia, which destroys red blood cells and can lead to full-blown anemia in dogs. You have a few ways to minimize this risk, such as cutting the onions big enough that they impart some flavor to the food before easy removal before serving, or just leaving the onions out of your dog food recipes altogether. It’s been suggested that the biggest danger in this comes from low-quality onions, so if you purchase good-quality onions, you may also minimize the danger. Two Japanese breeds, the Akita and the Shiba Inu are particularly susceptible.

Honey

While an excellent natural sweetener, honey is a food that is dangerous not only in dog food recipes fed to puppies, but if given in any recipe to a human infant as well. The reason behind this is that the honey can contain botulism spores, which don’t affect adults due to their strong immune systems, but can affect young animals and humans, who haven’t built up strong immunities yet. So be sure to leave the honey out.

Alcohol

Great for cooking in recipes for people, don’t try to get fancy and put any alcohol in dog food recipes. While wine or sherry make great, flavorful liquids for sauces for people, the alcohol never completely cooks out, and just as with people when it’s ingested in large amounts, alcohol can be fatal to dogs. Err on the side of caution and leave the alcohol out. By avoiding these dangers in dog food recipes, you will ensure that by cooking for your pet, you’re making him or her healthier instead of ill.