Nostalgia in a Soup

I grew up going to the same church my dad's family has been going to forever.  I don't know if they still do it (I've moved away and whatnot), but when I was a kid, they had an annual sausage supper in the fall.  The menu was set: sausage, sauerkraut, applesauce, and navy beans are what I remember; coinciding was a bazaar, a quilt raffle (quilt made by the quilting group), and (I think) a silent auction.  My great-grandmother made chocolate peanut butter balls (also known as buckeyes or peanut butter bon-bons, depending where you live) for them every year, sold for a quarter or fifty cents for a bag of three at the bazaar.  Since my siblings and I generally got to, you know, hang out at the church while my parents were working the kitchen or serving at the supper, we blew a lot of our accumulated money on the peanut butter balls.

Anywho.  The soup is actually the other flavors of the sausage supper, because although chocolate-peanut butter soup would probably be tasty (thinking something like a cream-based soup), it wouldn't really be supper, per se.

The change I made?  I don't like sauerkraut, so I went with straight shredded cabbage.  It's not the prettiest of soups, but it packs a pretty good flavor punch.

The soup:

• About a pound of link sausage, preferably a bratwurst type, cooked & sliced
• 1 small cabbage, shredded
• 2 huge or 4 medium potatoes, peeled & cubed
• 2 apples, peeled & cubed (I used McIntosh, but I think I might go with Granny Smith next time for the sturdiness and strength of flavor)
• 1 pound of navy beans, rinsed
• 8 cups of chicken stock or broth
• Onion to taste - I'd have added half an onion sliced, but my onions were... unpretty, so I threw in about an eighth cup of dried diced onion
• Salt & pepper to taste
• About half a teaspoon of garlic powder
• About a teaspoon of powdered mustard
• About a quarter cup of white vinegar

Throw everything in a slow cooker and cook on low for eight to ten hours.  I layered it, bottom to top, beans-potatoes-apples-cabbage-sausage, but only because that was the order I prepped them in.  Once it's done, stir through it to distribute the ingredients.

The chocolate peanut butter balls that I didn't think about making until just before I headed home tonight:

• 2 cups creamy peanut butter
• 1/2 cup butter
• 4 cups powdered sugar
• 3 cups crisp rice cereal
• 2 cups semisweet chocolate chips 2 bags of chocolate chips

Melt the peanut butter & butter together over low heat.  Mix the cereal and the powdered sugar together, then pour the peanut butter mix over it and blend it together.  Form this into balls (recommended about 1"), put them on cookie sheets, and chill them until they're firm.  The firm part is important, because next they're going into chocolate chips that you've melted in a double boiler.  The recipe calls for about one bag, but I've never gotten away with fewer than two bags.  So thoroughly coat them and drop them back onto cookie sheets lined with wax paper.  Once the cookie sheet is filled, they go back in the fridge to re-firm up.