Soup in a Jar

This week's theme at the Ultimate Recipe Swap is food gifts. One thing that I think is such a great idea for food gifts is making soup mixes, cookie mixes, muffins mixes and so on, to giveaway in jars.

My MIL has some great books that give many ideas of how to put these kinds of gifts together so last weekend while we were visiting, I copied out some of the ideas to put together. Earlier this week, I put together a few jars of Love Soup.

Love Soup
1/3 cup beef boullion
1/4 cup dried minced onion
1/2 cup dried split peas
1/2 cup macaroni
1/4 cup barley
1/2 cup lentils
1/3 cup long-grain white rice
1/2-1 cup tri-coloured spiral pasta

1. Layer all ingredients in the order given in a quart sized jar. Pack each ingredient before adding the next. Seal jar.

2. Attach instruction label to the jar which gives the following instructions:

Love Soup 1 jar Love Soup Mix
1 pound ground beef, browned and drained

Remove the tri-coloured spiral pasta from the Love Soup Mix and set aside. Place the remaining ingreidents in a large soup pot. Add 12 cups of water. Bring to a boil. Lower heat and simmer for 45 minutes. Add tri-coloured pasta, ground beef and simmer 15 minutes more. Enjoy!

I put mine together in snowman jars that my MIL and I found at a craft show earlier this year.

This is a quick and easy gift idea that only required about 10 minutes of my time and a number of ingredients that I always have on hand anyway.

There is nothing better than the gift of a piping hot bowl of soup!

This recipe is being linked at Tatertot's and Jello as a part of the Holly Bloggy Christmas Bash. Head over to Tatertot's and Jello to see some more great homemade gifts and to enter the giveaway!