Come home to a warm and festive fiesta soup dinner any weeknight using your slow cooker!

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A winter blast, and an old recipe favorite from the vault!

Piles and piles of snow have us making sure soup is on the menu at least once week lately! I’ve been meaning to give this super old soup favorite of my girls’ a little photo facelift for years, and this week was the week!

Slow cooker favorites…

This recipe dates back to well before I owned an Instant Pot, and was a reliable staple when things got busy with little ones in the house. Now that my girls are teenagers, I still fall back on this recipe for one of those days that I just want to dump everything in when I wake up in the morning, and not have to think about dinner all day. When everyone gets home from after school activities later in the evening, dinner is done, and *that* is doing real food in a sustainable way for regular, everyday families!

The Method :: The soup base and veggie line up

This slow cooker prep has pretty minimal chopping and prep. If you are newer to cooking, this is definitely a great place to start! Many of these ingredients will be found in your pantry and veggie bin. Two notes on the veggies. Firstly, don’t be afraid of the pumpkin! It really just adds a silky, smooth texture to the broth, and a pretty color. You cannot taste it. Additionally, you can swap the zucchini for just about anything. It is one of our favorites, and it happened to be on sale this week, but a lot of times I’ll use chopped baby spinach to add extra veggies to the soup. Both of these veggies don’t change the soup taste at all, but add all the fiber and nutrients.

Veteran slow cooker prep tip!

I think the biggest key to slow cooker meal planning is to prep as much as you can the night before. Chop the veggies. Pull out all the cans of whatever you need. You get the idea. This way, all you have to do is literally dump it all in when you get up in the morning. I chopped the onion, pepper, zucchini, and garlic, and popped it all into a container in the fridge overnight. It makes the morning prep super fast.

The Method :: The chicken

One of my favorite things about a slow cooker versus an Instant Pot, is that I really feel like chicken breasts get more tender and have better texture after slow cooking. All you have to do is add the chicken breasts to the soup ingredients and it will slowly poach in the soup. When the soup is done, pull them out and shred the chicken before returning it back to the soup. It is that easy!

How do I shred or cut the chicken after it cooks?

I like to use 2 forks to shred the chicken. It goes super fast because the chicken is really tender. If you prefer the texture of cubed chicken, you can cube it up. If you like smaller shreds, use a handheld blender with the chicken in a mixing bowl and it will really shred it up small.

Tell me about those toppings!

A toppings bar is where it’s at when it comes to this soup! It’s a fun way to give the kids some say over what they are eating, as well as have some fun decorating their bowl. We love sprinkles of cilantro, slices of avocado, dollops of coconut yogurt (you can use sour cream if you tolerate dairy!), as well as lots of lime juice! You can put tortilla chips out for scooping and crumbling into the soup too.

Don’t forget about school thermoses!

This slow cooker fiesta soup makes enough for 8-10 bowls depending on your kids’ appetites and ages. The leftovers only taste better with time, so packing up leftovers for your lunch, or the kids’ lunches in thermoses will become one of your favorite things about this meal! For more tips on using thermoses for lunchboxes, see this post.