Here’s a simple one – 6 ingredients, 1 crockpot, 4 hours, 1 amazing and addictive soup. So easy, so delicious and creamy, and pretty healthy if you use low-fat cream cheese and turkey sausage. Try to get bulk sausage from your butcher, if you can. The big name/pre-packaged stuff (Jimmy Dean, I’m looking at you) has high fructose corn syrup – yuck! Jasper is not a big fan of soups, unfortunately – which means that I got to eat this every day for lunch for a week and never got sick of it. In fact, I was still craving it after it was gone!
Creamy Tortellini Soup
You can thank Pinterest for this one. You need frozen tortellini to stand up to the long cooking time. If you can’t find it, reduce the cooking time by half for dried and even more for refrigerated. Also, if you are not using “Italian Style” tomatoes, you will need to add some spices.
adapted from Little Fellows
serves 4-6
1 lb ground sausage, preferably turkey
1 (8 oz) block cream cheese or neufchatel (less fat), I use cream cheese made from Greek yogurt which is as low fat as neufchatel but has more protein
1 (19oz) bag frozen cheese tortellini
1 bag fresh spinach (5 oz is common, but use as much as you want)
2 (14.5 oz) cans Italian style diced tomatoes
4 cups low sodium chicken broth
Brown the sausage and put into the crockpot with the cream cheese. Stir around a bit to break up the cream cheese and get it to start melting (this will help prevent lumps). Add in the rest of the ingredients. Set temp to low and cook for 3-4 hours (check pasta texture at 3 hours).