Recipe #30: Crock Pot Sausage and Tortellini

This is another dish that I have had pinned on Pinterest for awhile that I just wasn’t making the time to try. That was a big reason that I started this project, I really wanted to work through that list I had on Pinterest.

Crockpot Cheese Tortellini  

My phone apparently ate the photos that I took of this dish, so this is from the website…

Now I was intrigued by this recipe because on both Pinterest and the blog itself it was listed as “The best crockpot recipe I have tried yet.” As I have not had much luck with crockpot dishes, they are all rather bland for my tastes, I was hoping this would break that trend.

What you need:

1 (19oz) bag of frozen cheese tortellini
1 small bag of fresh spinach
2 (14.5 oz) cans of Italian style diced tomatoes
1 block of cream cheese (I used neufchatel since it has a 1/3rd less fat)
1 lb. of ground sausage
4 cups of chicken broth

You do need to cook the sausage first, if for no other reason than flavor. So even if you used precooked sausage, which she does in the blog, you will want to brown it first. Once you do that, you throw it all into the crock pot. Now this is where I learned something… order DOES matter. I really should have put the spinach in first. Instead I browned the sausage and scraped it and all the yummy brown bits into the crockpot then stack on top of it. Sausage does not compact, spinach does. Spinach also decreases in volume dramatically when it cooks. This would have made it much easier for me overall. So Spinach first, then tomatoes, then sausage and tortellini. Add the chicken broth and cream cheese (she recommends cubing it so it melts more evenly) and set it on low for 4-6 hours. Honestly, I would go with 4.

Our was on for about 5 hours and the tortellini pretty much dissolved into the …well soup at that point. It was just too overcooked. This dish was really yummy and I loved the tomatoes and spinach in it. Matt ate more spinach that he normally would, while he likes raw spinach, he does not particularly care for cooked. My only issue with this dish was I don’t see why it had to be slow cooker. It isn’t one of those dishes you put on at 7:30am and can come home to after work at 6pm, it only needs to cook for about 4 hours. Even then, after browning the sausage, you could easily cook this dish stove top in about 30 minutes as you only need to cook the tortellini. The flavors were all there and great, but the method just seemed unnecessary. So while I wouldn’t slow cook this again, I’d probably make it stove top! Oh, and I would also add more tomatoes, there just weren’t enough for me. This would be a great winter comfort soup… too bad it is heating up again.