Katie in the Kitchen

Katie was in charge of dinner last night.  She did at least 90% of the work to make this alphabet soup for dinner.  She even helped with cutting up the meat.  It was absolutely delicious and super easy to make since you just put everything in the crock pot. 

We doubled the recipe and honestly should have tripled it or more.  As written the recipe really makes about 4 servings I think.  Or it could be that the crock pot we used does cook a bit hot so a bit of the broth was cooked off and I didn't quite add enough water back in during the day.  We used small shells instead of alphabet shaped pasta because that was what we had in the house.  I plan on picking up the alphabet pasta on the next shopping trip for the next time we make this soup.  I never buy stewed tomatoes so we just used diced instead and I'd imagine any tomatoes you have in the house would work.  I would just make sure you use something that is bigger than a puree so you actually see the tomatoes in the soup.  You can also easily keep the amount of beef in the soup small (only double the beef amount while quadrupling the soup recipe) without loosing out on taste which helps keep the cost in an economical range.  With the only processed food truly being the onion soup mix (which you can just switch out and use diced onions and a bit of beef broth instead), this is a wonderful meal to start your kids cooking.  Real food, real simple, really delicious.