Sausage Minestrone Soup

Here I go with blog #1!
I decided to try a recipe from one of my favourite magazines - Woman's World.  I buy it every week for it's recipes and cake ideas.  I found this recipe in the September 27th, 2010 edition and decided to give it a whirl.  We love soup for dinner and I am always looking for new soup recipes.  The only thing I will do differently next time is NOT cook the noodles in the soup like it says to do.  I never do with my other soups but I was following the recipe for the first time.  We had the soup for dinner and I used the Dempster's brown and go loaves.  They are great!

Oops forgot to thaw the Italian sausages the night before so into a cold water bath they went while I got everything together and chopped the vegetables.  It took about an hour to get them soft to the touch so I could cook them.

I used homemade canned tomatoes that my Mom and I did this year.

Instead of using spray cooking oil I used Extra Virgin Olive Oil.

Recipes says to brown the sausage links first.  Next time I am going to brown them more.

I added fresh garlic to the chopped vegetables.  The recipe called for canned tomatoes with basil, garlic and oregano so I just added the spices to the mixture.

The smell of the sausage and vegetables sauteing together was mouth watering.

I put everything into a slow cooker because I thought hubby wouldn't be home for a while and he actually came home as I was taking this picture.  I then just set the slow cooker for 4 hours and waited.

The next time I will omit this step and cook the noodles by themselves in a chicken broth.  They disintegrated in the broth and made the soup almost stew like.

My new love...heat and serve baguette from Dempster's.

The finished product.