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!!

Vegetarian Chicken Cheese Soup

As I am in my early days of actually enjoying cooking, I just discovered how wonderful Crockpots are! After making amazing vegetarian chili, I searched around for some more good crock recipes. Since cheese is one of my major food groups, this vegetable cheese soup recipe sounded delish, but changes improvements were necessary. So two weekends ago (posting on time during the holidays is just impossible), my household hunkered down  to make some cheese soup and record some songs.

As an Irish gal, I scoffed at the recipe calling for only a cup of potatoes, and cut up 3 medium sized spuds. It's difficult to have too much onion, so I included a 1 large onion (chopped). I then chopped up the cup of carrots and gathered the ingredients together for crockpot time!

It was then time to combine the 2 cans of vegetable broth, 1 can of creamed corn, potatoes, carrots, onions, 1 tsp celery seed, and a little bit of pepper. After careful consideration (see: I had a "duh!" momement), I added two cloves of minced garlic to the mix. 

The original recipe instructs us to cook this mixture on low for 8 hours, however I majorly overslept had a very busy morning, so I turned it up to high for 4.5 hours, after which time I added a 15oz jar of processed cheese sauce and about a cup of shredded cheddar.

My love of fake meat is unwavering and the meat-eating men in my life tend to prefer when I make things that include this delicious faux-animal carcass, so it only made sense to add fake chicken strips to the mix, after letting the cheese-saturated soup cook for about 45 minutes. Next time I make this, I'll probably fry the chicken strips first, to give them a little bit of crispyness. Also at this time, I was feeling that the soup looked quite runny, so I ended up adding about a cup of flour, which did help slightly. If you have any thoughts on how to not make it so watery, please let me know!

After letting all of that cook for a final hour, it was time to enjoy! So me and three boys put the music aside, grabbed a beer and turned on America's Funniest Home Videos on Netflix (trust me, it's funnier than you remember). They gave me RAVE reviews and I have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed it myself. I will definitely be making this again. See a summary of the ingredients below, and make this soul-warming dish ASAP!

2 cans vegetable broth

3 medium sized potatoes

About 1 cup chopped carrots

1 onion, chopped

1 can creamed corn

1 tsp celery seed

2 cloves garlic (minced)

Pepper - as much as you desire (I tend to use less pepper than others)

1 jar processed cheese (can be found in the chip aisle)

1 cup shredded cheddar (or whatever cheese you prefer)

1 package fake chicken strips (I used chicken-less strips from Trader Joe's but I also love Morning Star Farm's fake chicken strips)

If you have any suggestions on how to make this recipe better for the next time around, please leave a comment!