The swollen packs are due to incomplete sterilisation, leading to bacterial activity. Given time it would have popped and delivered a stinking mess into your kitchen.
I know what everyone means about the BARF "leap" - as you'll see from other thread I jumped/leaped into it a week ago on Friday. It's easy which has surprised me.
If you're going to cook stuff, I'd still suggest the "BARF" model of what you should be feeding. The books talk about modelling the diet around what a dog would catch for itself. So if you look at a rabbit:
1. fur - eaten, but not digested - good fibre, moves everything along;
2. smallish portion of veg/fruit - what would be found in the rabbit's stomach - plus occasional bits picked up here and there;
3. bone - excellent source of fibre, minerals and vitamins;
4. muscle meat - protein, vitamins, minerals;
5. organ meat - protein, high levels of essential fatty acids for brain, nerves, skin and myriad other functions.
So if you try to replicate those items, you should be fine. For the veg/fruit - blend/pulp it or cook it lightly to break down the cellulose and make it "bio-available" - ie digestible and the nutrients absorbable. One book recommends mixing to give a balance of colours of veg and "above" ground and "below ground" stuff - so over a month, you'd feed carrots, red, yellow, green peppers, spinach broccoli, blue green and red fruits, and eg if you have below ground carrot, balance it with some above ground spinach.
I've also contacted Dorwest Herbs (think it's dorwest.co.uk) and bought some Tree Barks powder (slippery elm and white birch - both good for colitis) and some Keeper's Mix - a kelp and alfalfa powder which is high in vits/minerals and uses a great fibre source called pysllium husks (great for humans too!).
All the books I've read question the inclusion of cereals in dogs' diets - other than some wild grains they might digest from prey's stomachs, they'd have very little if any cereals, so I'd steer clear of bulking up this way.
Another point: amounts. Don't forget that you might be feeding e.g. 240 grams of NatureDiet at each of two meals. You shouldn't be replacing this with 240 grams of home cooked food at each meal or you'll end up with a porker. BARF recommends about 3% bodyweight in food per day - perhaps some of the "home cookers" can comment on how much they feed.
Let us know how you've got on.
Denise
On the bone front, your issue is that "safe" bones need to be raw: giving a cooked bone can lead to splintering being a much higher risk than if it's given raw. But that might be your "intro" to raw feeding: buy some chicken wings and watch (as Kymythy puts it) in a "loving and confident" way, how your dog eats it. I thought Paddy, the little guzzler, would try to gulp and guzzle them but he chews and gnaws patiently, with his little docked tail wagging for England...
