Slow-cooker Vegetarian Tortilla soup

My weekend was great! It included a midnight showing of Wayne's World at one of my favorite places in Chicago, the Music Box, seeing an amazing local punk band, the Lawrence Arms, and having a bunch of my friends over for a friendly round of quarters.

But after the heart-breaking football game on Sunday, I'm very glad me and Tom had prepared a delicious soup to rekindle my cold, angry heart. While the Steeler's game left a horrible taste in my mouth, this stuff turned out to be QUITE delicious.

While preparing the shopping list for the weekend, the boyfriend insisted on another crock-pot experiment. After perusing the web and Pinterest for vegetarian slow-cooker recipes, we hadn't found anything too interesting. However, a recipe for Chicken Tortilla soup popped up. Being raised in a meat-and-potatoes household, I had never even discovered tortilla soup until after I had ceased with the meat, so we decided to try improvising a Caitlin-friendly recipe, taking some direction from recipes online, but also adding our own ingredients as we saw fit. This is what we ended up with:

2 cans vegetable broth
1 package fake chicken
1 can corn
1 can black beans
1 onion, chopped
1 green pepper, chopped
1 can enchilada sauce
1 can crushed tomatoes
2-3 cloves garlic minced
1 tsp chili powder
1 tsp cumin
1 bay leaf (i'm not really familiar with what this adds to a dish, but since one of the recipes called for it and I had it on my spice rack shelf, I threw it in)

After cooking up the fake chicken in a pan with some oil to add cripsyness, we combined all of these ingredients in a crock-pot. At the last minute, Tom decided to also throw in a can of chili beans that we had lying around (and I'm very glad he did).

 We let that simmer on low for about 6 1/2 hours. When we returned from watching the travesty Steelers game, I preheated the oven to 350, cut 6 corn tortillas in to strips and baked them for about 8 minutes.

 When they were crispy enough, we doled out the soup, and topped it with the tortilla strips and a handful of shredded cheese.

The soup ended up being great! The fake chicken was juicy, the beans offered a nice, fuller texture and the after-taste was awesome. I can't handle spicy things well, but if you are a heat-lover, adding chile peppers to the mix would have offered a nice kick. I can not wait to eat the leftovers for lunch!!