Easy Old Fashioned Vegetable Soup with Ground Beef
Looking for a simple soup that you can make in the slow cooker or on the stove top? This Old Fashioned Vegetable Soup with ground beef is a great frugal meal to feed your family this winter!
Easy Old Fashioned Vegetable Soup with Ground Beef
In the fall and winter, there is nothing better than a warm soup to serve your family at supper time. This Old Fashioned Vegetable Soup also contains ground beef and a little pasta to make it a hearty, one-dish meal that the whole family is sure to love.
This Vegetable Soup recipe is so easy to make because you really can just toss the ingredients in the slow cooker or in a dutch oven on your stove and it will be ready to go by supper time.
Our family loves a good soup recipe and I also love things that I can cook in a very limited number of pans so that I don’t have so many dishes to do at the end of the day.
This is also a great recipe because it can be made from ingredients that you likely already have in your pantry.
Ingredients for the Old Fashioned Vegetable Soup With Ground Beef
- Ground Beef. You can leave this out if you want this to only be a veggie soup or you can add it in for those who want to make the soup a little heartier and to have a good protein. If you do choose to add ground beef, this is a great way to stretch a pound of beef into a meal that can fill a crowd!
- Frozen Vegetables. You can make this recipe super easy by adding a bag of frozen mixed vegetables OR you can add a quart of home canned mixed vegetables. If you don’t have either, you can simply dice up some fresh veggies that you have on hand (carrots, green beans, corn, potatoes, celery, onion, and peas are all good!) and use those instead.
- Diced Tomatoes. You can use store-bought or home-canned tomatoes.
- Beef Broth. Making your own broth in advance and being able to pull it out of the freezer will make this recipe more nutritious and more frugal! You can use vegetable or chicken broth if you don’t have any beef broth on hand.
- Salt and Black Pepper.
- Elbow Macaroni Noodles. If you don’t have elbow noodles on hand, use what you have! You can use gluten-free noodles to make this soup gluten free. Again, you don’t have to add the noodles if you really don’t want to but they do help to bulk it up a bit and make it more hearty for those growing kids!
FAQS About Old Fashioned Vegetable Soup
How do you fix bland soup?
You can add a little acid into your soup if you finish cooking it and find it too bland for your tastes. A small amount of lemon or lime juice will go a long way!
You could also add in a couple of dashed of Worcestershire Sauce for bland soup as well.
How can I make my soup more flavorful?
You can roast the veggies (if using fresh cut) before adding them to the soup to add more flavor. You can also be sure and use homemade beef stock to give this soup its best flavor potential since homemade stock will have more flavor than store-bought.
You could also add in some fresh herbs to give this soup an extra flavor boost. Thyme and/or rosemary would be particularly good. Some dried basil an an added bay leaf could work well also.
Since this recipe is super simple, it doesn’t have many spices in it so you could also add onion powder, garlic powder, or some cloves garlic into the soup as well for more flavor.
How to can vegetable soup with hamburger?
You can pressure can this Hamburger Vegetable Soup to enjoy it later. You will need to hot pack your jars. Quarts will need to be pressure canned for 75 minutes. You can find the full instructions on here on Pressure Canning Soups.
How to make vegetable soup with stew meat?
If you have beef stew meat you’d rather add to soup instead of ground beef. Simply brown it slightly on the outside before adding it to the stew to cook. Be sure the stew meat is cooked through before serving the soup.
Can you freeze Old Fashioned Vegetable Beef Soup?
Yes, you can freeze this soup recipe (and most soup recipes). Just cool the soup down after you cook it and place it in some kind of freezer container. I personally like these 32-ounce Reditainers for freezing broths and soups.
What To Serve With Ground Beef Vegetable Soup
- Breadsticks. Soup always goes great with breadsticks! If you want to keep things simple, try these Make Ahead Breadsticks.
- Biscuits. There are many kinds of biscuits you could make and serve with this soup but our favorites are these Cream Biscuits.
- Simple Salad. A simple salad with a Homemade Salad Dressing could really bring some freshness to this meal.
- Cornbread. Our family loves cornbread in the wintertime as a side dish! It adds some extra heartiness and tastes great with soup.
More Homemade Soup Recipes
Soups are a wonderful meal to make in the winter because they can often be made with whatever you have in the fridge and they help those winter vegetables to really shine. We love soups because we can make a big batch and they will last us a couple of days for meals.
Here are some more homemade soup recipes that our family really loves:
- Bean with Bacon Soup Recipe
- Apple Cheddar Soup Recipe
- Roasted Vegetable Soup Recipe
- The Best French Onion Soup Recipe
- Homemade Vegetable Soup
- Homemade Pasta Fagioli Soup Mix
- Homemade Cream of Mushroom Soup

Old Fashioned Vegetable Soup With Ground Beef
This delicious soup gives a hearty spin on simple vegetable soup.
Ingredients
- 1 pound Ground Beef
- 12 oz Frozen Mixed Vegetables
- 1 14 oz can Diced Tomatoes, undrained
- 1 32 oz Beef Broth
- Salt and pepper to taste
- 1 cup uncooked Elbow Macaroni Noodles
Instructions
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Add the ground beef to a medium pan, and brown over medium heat. Drain grease.
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Add cooked ground beef, mixed veggies, diced tomatoes, broth, salt, and pepper to a crockpot.
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Cook on high for 4 hours, or low for 7-8 hours.
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Add the noodles 30 minutes before serving to allow them to cook.
Recipe Notes
If you want the broth to be a little thicker, add in a can of tomato paste while the soup is still cooking.
To cook this soup on the stove top instead of the slow cooker, put the ingredients together as shown in the directions and then simmer the soup in a dutch oven on the stovetop for about an hour so that all of the flavors have time to come together.
I hope your family enjoys making this recipe!
What kinds of soups do you like to make on a regular basis?
My Dad used to make this soup, so it was a family favorite! My sister and I still stock up on the ingredients before winter so we can always put on a pan of soup to warm us up with good nourishing food and memories!
We can this soup, without the noodles, of course. We brown the meat, add raw vegetables including lots of potatoes because we’re not using the noodles, seasonings, broth and pressure can quarts for 90 minutes (60 minutes for pints) at 10 pounds pressure (where we live. Higher elevations would use 15 pounds pressure).
My husband used to take this canned version when he would drive truck so he got homemade goodness while on the road.
This is the best soup! I have made it this way fro decades and still love it. To stretch it and make it even better I add any left over veggies from the fridge and sliced cabbage. Oh my…a feast on a budget. Thanks for sharing so many truly yummy recipes that are affordable during these difficult days.
Just put this in the crockpot for tonight. Modified vegetables to what was on hand and added a bay leaf. Also copied your bean and bacon soup for another time. I am going to try to start dinner in the crockpot more often instead of waiting till late in the day when I am tired
We make this (and quite a few other hearty soups) all fall/winter long but omit tomato in most of them as I am allergic. That said, my SO and the kids love a good chili or veggie soup with tomato from time to time (and I can usually whip up a bowl or two of something hearty for myself!)
Keep the soup recipes coming; always looking for easy ones to add into our meal planning!
Soup was delicious. About half way through cooking time I did add a small can of tomato paste to thicken. As there are only 2 of us we will have a couple more meals from this. Thanks for a great recipe.
I’m so glad you liked it!
Oh my goodness this looks so easy and I’m sure it would work with gluten free shells or something
Yes it will!
I’m going to make this weekend.
Thank you!
Nancy