CrockPot Pizza Soup

I had a Crockpot for about five years before I even took it out of the box. Now I probably use it at least once a week and it’s usually on days when I know we are going to be getting home late and it’s so nice to have dinner ready and waiting for us. I also love how awesome our house smells when we walk in the door. 🙂 I found this recipe over at my favorite CrockPot website.

Ingredients:
14oz. jar of pizza sauce
3 empty jars of water
1 green bell pepper, chopped
1 can diced tomatoes, drained
2 already cooked Italian sausage links
1 c. pepperoni, cut into quarters
8 fresh basil leaves, chopped
1 T dried oregano
1/2 c. macaroni noodles (or a pasta about that size)
Shredded mozzarella

Directions:
Wash and prepare green peppers. Dump them into the crockpot. Cut up the sausage into small pieces–I sliced, then cut the pieces in fourths. Add to crockpot. Cut up the pepperoni, add it, too. Add basil and oregano. Pour in the pizza sauce, and follow with three empty jars of water.

Cover and cook on low for 7-9 hours. Everything in this is already cooked, so you are really only heating through and allowing the flavors to meld.

Thirty minutes before serving, add the dry pasta, and turn to high. My pasta only took 20 minutes to soften quite nicely.

Garnish/top with shredded mozzarella cheese.

Variation: The great thing about this is that you can add whatever you would normally put on a pizza. The original recipe called for mushrooms and onions, but we don’t get those on pizza so I left them off. There is a lot of room to play around with this recipe and add/take away whatever “toppings” you do/don’t want.

What did the family think? Sean and I liked it. I told the boys it was like pizza so they ate it.