Crockpot Tortellini and Sausage Soup

It's been a while since I've posted a recipe, but figured it was about time I posted a really great recipe I discovered and tried out a few months back.

I made this recipe with garlic bread rolls and a salad, so watch for those recipes next! Make sure you read the modifications I made to the recipe before making this so you can change what you'd like when you make it yourself!

(Here is the link to the soup website--I've modified a few things, so it won't be quite the same as this page.)
http://www.keyingredient.com/recipes/573551783/crockpot-cheese-tortellini-and-sausage/



Ingredients:

1 (19 oz) bag of frozen cheese tortellini
1 lb sausage
1 bag fresh spinach
2 cans tomato soup
2 cans low-fat chicken broth
1 pkg (8 oz) cream cheese, diced into small cubes

Directions:
Brown the sausage in a skillet on the stove top until cooked and crumbled. Drain.

Add sausage and remaining ingredients to a 6-quart slow cooker. Stir to combine.

Cook on LOW for about 5 hours, stirring twice during cooking.

MY MODIFICATIONS:
Tortellini: I bought fresh tortellini (kept by the cold cheeses) because I couldn't find any frozen tortellini and just froze them when I got home. The texture was still great. They just have to be frozen when you put them in the crock pot.

Sausage: I bought turkey sausage. It wasn't as spicy as the intended Italian sausage was for this recipe, but it was still very flavorful, and it made the soup much less oily then Italian would have made it.

Spinach: I only used about 1/2 a bag of spinach. I love spinach in salads, but I'm not a fan of it in soups. I still found 1/2 a bag of spinach to be quite a lot of spinach for this soup. Just eyeball how much spinach you want in your soup. When it's done cooking, you can't really taste the spinach, but it makes the soup really pretty. :)

Tomatoes: I HATE tomatoes, so I used tomato soup instead. It gave this soup a really pretty color instead of a creamy white color. It was a light red, and was really pretty. You can substitute tomato soup for diced tomatoes instead--I just don't like tomatoes.

Cream cheese: Make sure you dice that cream cheese into small cubes! I cut mine into about 1/2 inch cubes, and by the end of cooking, they weren't done melting quite yet, and sometimes you'd get a chunk of cream cheese in your spoon. The smaller you make those cubes, the more they'll dissolve and evenly spread out through cooking!

Enjoy! This is easily one of my new very favorite recipes! I made this for myself and one friend, and we each had two bowls of it. I still had about 4 servings left when we were done, and it's extremely filling.