tortellini soup

Earlier today it was rainy, nasty, and the tornado sirens even went off - like they did last night - and last weekend. Fortunately we're all good here... unfortunately, it sounds like there was some damage in the city from a tornado here and that there is some damage in some areas back home - and I wish everyone who was affected the best, as I'm sure it's not easy right now - so if that's you ... [inserting good vibes here].

Looking out now, you'd never know. The sun is shining and it warmed up quite a bit - which I wasn't totally expecting.  Since it was cooler and rainy earlier, I thought it would be a good idea to make some soup. By the time it was done, it was warm and kind of humid and not exactly soup weather, but it was good regardless. :)  And it felt good to make some real food because when I was cooking for one for a couple of weeks, I didn't make a whole lot. And now that I think about it, the only other thing I really made-made was soup, too - the zesty tomato soup I made one other time. This time, I made a tortellini soup - and used a recipe from allrecipes.com called Mushroom, Leek, Chicken Sausage Tortellini soup. It was delicious! I'm not going to repost the recipe here, because I pretty much followed it.  Here are the only notes I have from it:

• I had some leftover beef broth, so I used up the last of that (2 c.) and did 4 c. of chicken broth
• The chicken sausage I had was some kind of spicy - and it added a lot of flavor to the soup. Really nice. 
• The recipe says to add salt and pepper to taste -- I didn't add any, and it didn't need it. So don't add any until you taste your soup. You may not need it. 
• For the hot sauce, we didn't have Tabasco, but I used Frank's Red Hot.

All in all, we loved it and served it with some bread and strawberries on the side. Here's what it looked like:

Give it a try. You can thank me later.