By Chris Ross / The San Diego Union-Tribune
Sara Lynn Cauchon grew up with a love for cooking, but when she became a busy professional as a young adult she found she was spending less and less time in the kitchen. To save money and improve her diet, she committed to doing meal planning and Sunday meal prep for the week. Eventually, she quit her job as a television producer to launch a YouTube cooking show called “The Domestic Geek,” which now has more than a million viewers. The show is dedicated to showing easy and inexpensive ways to make meals that are both healthy and delicious.
Her first cookbook is “The Domestic Geek’s Meals Made Easy.” Among the recipes is her lighter version of Greek avgolemono soup, with lemon juice, eggs and fresh herbs. It takes just five minutes to prep and 30 minutes to cook.
“I promise that once you taste it, you’ll never look at chicken soup the same way again,” she writes in her introduction to the recipe.
Find her YouTube shows online at bit.ly/18VP6DK.
Greek chicken soup
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
1 medium yellow onion, diced
3 medium carrots, diced
3 celery stalks, diced
8 cups chicken broth, homemade or store-bought
3 cups shredded cooked chicken
1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves
1 bay leaf
1 cup orzo
2 large eggs
Juice of 1 lemon
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
2 tablespoons chopped fresh dill
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
In a large Dutch oven or soup pot, heat the olive oil over medium-high heat. Add the onion, carrots and celery. Cook, stirring often, until they become tender, about 6 minutes. Add the broth, shredded chicken, thyme and bay leaf. Bring the broth to a boil and add the orzo. Reduce the heat to medium and simmer until the orzo is cooked through, about 15 minutes.
In a small heatproof bowl, whisk together the eggs and lemon juice. While whisking continuously, use a ladle to slowly add 1 cup of the hot broth to the egg mixture. (This process is called tempering and will prevent the raw eggs from scrambling when they’re added to the hot soup.)
Pour the tempered egg mixture back into the soup pot and simmer for 5 minutes more. Stir in the fresh parsley and dill and season the soup with salt and pepper.
Serve immediately or store in the refrigerator for up to 3 days.
Simple swaps: To keep this soup gluten-free, you can replace the orzo with 1 cup uncooked white rice.
Mix it up: To make this soup even more nutritious, stir in 4 cups chopped baby spinach during the last 2 minutes of cooking. Cook, stirring, until the spinach has wilted completely, then serve.
Makes 4 servings.
— Excerpted from “The Domestic Geek’s Meals Made Easy: A Fresh Fuss-free Approach to Healthy Cooking” by Sara Lynn Cauchon. Reproduced by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
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