Recipe: Pizza Soup

I can't remember where I found the basic recipe for this. I changed ours due to our lack of vegetable acceptance. But this could include whatever toppings you like on your pizza. The original included mushrooms, but we left those out.

Ingredients

• 1 jar (14 oz) pizza sauce
• 3 jars of water
• 1 bell pepper, seeded & chopped
• 1 can diced tomatoes, drained
• 1/2 lb Italian Sausage, browned & drained
• 1 cup pepperoni slices, quartered
• 1/2 Tbsp basil
• 1 Tbsp oregano
• 1/2 cup dry pasta
• shredded mozzarella cheese

Directions

Put the bell pepper, tomatoes, sausage, and pepperoni (and any other toppings you might like) in a 5 to 6 quart or bigger crockpot. Pour the pizza sauce and water. Add the seasonings (I ended up using Pensezy's Pasta Sprinkle mix because I was too lazy to dig through the cabinet to find basil and oregano). Stir it around a little. Turn the crockpot on low and let it cook for at least 6 hours, or all day if you want. Everything is already cooked, you just want to flavors to meld.

About 30 minutes before dinner time, add the dry pasta and turn the crockpot to high. Watch it, my pasta only took about 20 minutes to be soft.

Spoon into bowls and sprinkle with mozzarella cheese. We had a nice loaf of Italian bread with it.

Our Thoughts

We really liked this recipe. Justin is a huge fan of pizza, so I figured this would work for him. I think it might be fun to mix up what is it, kind of like I do with pizza toppings. It would also be easy to make this vegetarian by just leaving out the meat and adding more vegetables. Justin thought a different pizza sauce would be better. I used Prego this time because it was on sale. Next time I might see if they have a restaurant brand that might be better.