88 All-Time Best Dinner Recipes

I have made this recipe multiple times every year for about 3, maybe 4 years. It is amazing! It makes LOTS of soup! That is a good thing because my grandkids cannot get enough of it. I have made one change though - when using flour as the thickener, I had a lot of trouble with siphoning in the canner. I checked with couple canning sites and now use 1 3/4 cups of clear jel canning corn starch instead of the flour. It solved the siphoning problem. Either way you make it, it is delicious and it is the reason I grow a dozen or more tomato plants every summer! Thank you for a terrific recipe!

What can I use in place of celery? Or could I leave out.