Cooking with Kelly: Slow Cooker Carrot Soup

I love my slow cooker so much. I got it as a wedding present from my parents' neighbor and have certainly gotten a lot of use out of it. It's a larger oval-shaped model that's digital and automatically switches to a warming mode once the cooking time has elapsed.

I also love coming home to a tasty meal that was cooking with love in the laziest possible way. I was in the mood for some soup and had a bag of carrots in the crisper, so I set out to make something that wasn't too heavy but still kept me full.

Slow Cooker Carrot Soup
1 large onion, sliced
2 large garlic cloves, peeled and chopped
1 1/2 pounds carrots, peeled and chopped into chunks
5 cups stock (I used home made turkey stock, but you can use what you prefer)
1 1/2 teaspoons dried ginger
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1 cup of Splenda
1 cup of brown sugar

Place the onion, garlic, carrots and stock into the crock pot. Cook on low for eight hours. When you get home, add the remaining ingredients, stir and cook on high for one hour. If you have an immersion blender, it would be extremely helpful in pulsing this all together. Instead, I used my food processor in batches.

I rounded this meal out with a simple salad topped with Marzetti Simply Dressed salad dressing in the Caesar flavor. I got this sample through the Foodbuzz Tastemakers program. Now that I'm so close to my half marathon, I'm trying to limit the amount of crap that I'm eating, so I appreciate that I can pronounce all the ingredients on this product.