Cabbage Steup Rerun

Continuing on with the whittling down of enormous posts, I'm breaking down my Crock Pot post into the two recipes I blogged about.

Cabbage Steup (it's kinda like stew, and kinda like soup...)

32 oz. vegetable broth (or chicken broth)
1 medium or large cabbage, chopped
2 - 28 oz cans or 1 - 56 oz can of chunky tomato sauce
28 oz water
14 oz can kidney beans, drained
1 can sliced carrots, drained
1 can whole kernel corn, drained
1 can cut green beans, drained
1 6 oz. can tomato paste

Optional ingredients:
3-4 chicken breasts
3-4 medium/large potatoes

Add broth, cabbage, tomato sauce, and water to a large crock pot (you need the biggest crock pot possible - I think mine is 6 qt. - or two smaller crock pots) (add potatoes and chicken at this time, too). Cook in crock pot until cabbage is 3/4 cooked (looks somewhat transparent). Add remaining ingredients and salt, pepper, garlic, and bay leaves and cook for another 1-2 hours or until cabbage is soft (and chicken and potatoes are cooked).

Now, I personally do it a little differently. I apologize that I didn't get pictures from the beginning, but I didn't think about it until I already had a few ingredients in the pot. So, here's what I did. First, I prefer to not use canned stuff if I don't have to, so I soaked some dry kidney beans over night, and put a couple cups (give or take) in the crock pot. I also have this enormous stockpile of dried vegetables that I like to throw in everything so that I can use it up. I also add an onion. So, here's the cabbage steup that far, along with the first half of the cabbage:
Now it may not look like there's a lot of cabbage in there, but when you add in the second half, it nearly fills up the crock:
I also add raw carrots at the beginning instead of canned (and I'd put in raw corn and green beans, too, if I had them):
And of course, I didn't have tomato sauce (I could have sworn we had a couple cans, but whatever), so I just used 2 cans of diced tomatoes and 2 cans of tomato paste:
I also didn't have any broth, so I used vegetable bouillon cubes and added some water. So, once everything is in the crock, mix it up as well as you can without spilling stuff all over (because at this point, it's VERY full), and set it to cook:

Aaaaaaaaand, here's the finished steup! I haven't broken it down yet, but it will make at least six meals.
We ended up adding noodles to it this time. Very yummy.