Lasagna Soup!

Hello!  I hope ya'll are enjoying this beautiful fall weather.  Today I ran five miles outside with a friend who was in town visiting for the weekend.  The leaves here are all sorts of beautiful yellows, oranges, and reds, and the weather was perfect - mostly sunny and about 46 degrees.

So, you might recall that I had a goal of trying 4 new recipes this month.  New recipe #1 was Lasagna Soup, a recipe I found while perusing Pintrest.  I love Italian food / pasta, so I was excited to try a recipe that had lasagna flavors without lasagna calories.  Step one of this recipe was to cook the onion, bell pepper, garlic, and the Italian flavored turkey sausage.  In order to make it Scott-friendly, I skipped the bell pepper.  I also used chicken sausage instead of turkey sausage, because that's what I could find at the grocery store.

After about 10 minutes I added the broth, tomato sauce, diced tomatoes, and red pepper.  I think I added too much red pepper, but this is probably because I failed to measure it and not because the recipe calls for too much.  The soup ended up being pretty spicy.  Scott didn't have any complaints and I actually like spicy food, but I just don't think lasagna-inspired soup ought to be that spicy.  Anyway, after simmering for another 20 minutes, I added broken lasagna noodles.  So, "broken lasagna noodles" is ambiguous.  I broke each noodle into about 8 smaller pieces, but I think it must have been much smaller / bite sized.

After the noodles were cooked, I stirred in mozzarella cheese, basil, and Parmesan, and dinner was served!

So, overall this was delicious.  It had some great flavors and was very filling, which I appreciate in a soup.  I do wish it was thicker, though - maybe more tomato sauce or even tomato paste would help.  Next time, I think it might be better to stir the mozzarella into individual servings so that it melts on top nicely - especially if you are going to reheat some servings later - just save the cheese for when you are heating it up!  I also think more vegetables would be awesome.  Yes, I left out bell pepper so Scott would enjoy it, but I think bell peppers, mushrooms, and black olives would be great additions to the soup!  Overall, though, a delicious recipe I'd make again!