I have a love-hate relationship with cooking. For the most part, I love finding new recipes to try and actually enjoy cooking on the weekends. But I don’t really like recipes that are too labor intensive or make a wreck of the kitchen. This is especially true on week nights when all I want to do is come home to a hot meal that requires minimal effort and even less cleanup.
Because of this, anyone who has remotely discussed cooking with me will know that I LOVE my slow cooker (aka crock pot, as I’ve always known it). There is something so awesome about being able to dump a bunch of ingridients in the pot and letting them cook all day then come home to a delicious smelling house and a warm meal that requires no more effort than dumping the finished product into a bowl and shoving it in my face.
This is a recipe that I’ve been for about a year now. It’s kind of my version of Italian wedding soup that I’ve modified along the way to accomodate our cooking needs and tastes. I ran across a version on a blog somewhere that required you to cook it on the stove and I thought to myself that I could make it in the crock pot and have been doing it ever since.
My goal is to make the ingredients easy to obtain and store so you don’t have to rush to make it before any fresh produce expires. It’s also easily modified to fit your tastes. And it is so, so delicious on a cold winter’s night – or anytime of year, really. Because of the broth, I think it works year round.