Lemon Orzo Soup with Chicken

I’m so happy to be post­ing a new recipe with shots from the lovely Maya Vis­nyei! It’s been way too long. We’ve been hard at work on our cook book for the past few months and that meant we had to take a break from our typ­i­cal photography/recipe pro­duc­tion sched­ule. But we shot the cook book’s cover — actu­ally we shot three ver­sions and don’t know yet our­selves which will make the cut! — two weeks ago. And then on Mon­day we received the best email ever from our edi­tor announc­ing that our man­u­script is com­plete. Of course we’ll still have plenty to do with copy edit­ing and the design process but the really heavy lift­ing is done! It was an amaz­ing (and bizarre and fun and exas­per­at­ing and hilar­i­ous) expe­ri­ence and I wish we could share the results with you all sooner.

But I con­fess it’s nice to get back into the groove and direct those ener­gies back into the site. I spent a day with Maya last week and I know Laura is doing the same thing this week so there’s lots of good stuff com­ing your way. First up: soup! This is prob­a­bly the eas­i­est soup I’ve ever made and although it’s hearty enough to be din­ner, the fresh, lemon-y  flavour keeps it light. I’ve made this soup twice in the last week and I think I ate most of both batches! The kids were a bit skep­ti­cal but both tried it and had about half a bowl which I’m going to call a great suc­cess.  Based loosely on the Greek soup called Avgole­mono, my ver­sion adds chicken to make it more of a meal. The only trick is to be sure you tem­per your eggs before adding them to the broth s0 it becomes creamy not cur­dled. But really, it’s sim­ple pim­ple. I still have half a bag of orzo in the cup­board, I think I may have to make this again.…

pho­tos by Maya Vis­nyei