Episode: 2876
Title: HPR2876: Sausage Orzotto
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2876/hpr2876.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 12:38:23

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This is HPR Episode 2876 entitled, Sausage or Not-O, It is hosted by Windigo, and in about 42 minutes long, and Karimanec Closet Flag, a summary of a favorite recipe dictated while it is cooked.
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Good evening, hacker public radio. This is Windigo, and I'm making dinner. Please excuse the toddler in the background. She is why you haven't heard from me in a while, but I figured I've got to make food, so this is a great opportunity to record an episode.
So what I'm making right now is chicken sausage or zatto. It's got mozzarella, zucchini and tomatoes in it. It's a pasta dish, which I'll get into later. And it's delicious. It's one of those recipes where even if you screw up, it ends up pretty good, which is important because I'm not that great a cook.
I'm amateur at best. So I suppose I should start with the name. So first of all, it's chicken sausage, which I'm immediately going to change to pork sausage because I don't know if that's just what we get generally.
We've kind of made some modifications on the basic recipe since we got it. The recipe came from a service called Hello Fresh, which is a delivery service that sends you a box of ingredients and a couple recipes for those ingredients.
So you can get a couple like pre-portioned out meals. It's a great way to try out new recipes. It takes the decision making out of what's going to be eaten that night.
And it makes generally few leftovers, which has been kind of nice. And this is one of our favorite recipes. So we've stolen it and repurposed it for dinner.
So we started off with pork sausage. And I'm going to have a list of ingredients in the show notes because I don't know if I'm going to list them all. And I honestly don't know them all most of the time. We've been adapting quite a bit.
And the next part is orzato, which is a two-part ingredient. So orzato is orzo pasta prepared like a risotto. So I'll start with orzo.
Orzo is this very tiny rice-like pasta. I actually thought it was some sort of exotic grain before I had to hunt it down for this recipe. And it's just tiny pasta.
It comes in a teeny tiny box like, let's see, this is probably four inches by three inches for a pound of pasta. And it seems like it wouldn't be that much, but it lasts forever.
We're only going to use a cup and a half of it for this recipe. And that feeds two to four people depending on how hungry you are. And risotto is a technique of cooking rice or orzo pasta.
I'm not sure if it works with other ones, but it's the technique that uses less water by pre-cooking the pasta.
So you actually fry up the pasta in a little bit of butter, which I forgot about. I'm going to go grab it from the fridge.
And that means you only need to use a cup and a half of water instead of the whole sticks cups or however much it usually takes to boil some pasta.
So let's see. That explains what I'm going to be making, but I'll just list off a couple of the ingredients really quick.
So we've got zucchini, sausage, as I mentioned, orzo pasta. And we're going to use about a cup and a half of that, crushed tomatoes.
That's what the original recipe calls for. We actually have diced tomatoes, and it works just fine.
We're going to use the whole can, I believe. I might have to half that, but I'm not sure. We will see.
It calls for panko bread crumbs and mozzarella. Shredded if you can get it because it'll just save you time.
A shallot, which I'll explain a little bit later, Italian seasoning, which I'll go into in depth.
Chicken stock concentrate, which is really nice stuff if you've never tried it. It's just, it's like orange juice concentrate, but just chicken stock.
So you add the water later. And that's it. It requires a really big skillet or pan if you've got one.
If you have an oven ready pan, like a cast iron pan, that would work even better. I don't. So I have a big, a big pan and a casserole dish kind of thing that I use.
And you need a large mixing bowl lined with paper towels that'll come in later.
It requires a grater, like a cheese grater, but you'll be using a zucchini, and I'm going to trim one ends off of that right now while I'm thinking.
You need a spoon, some butter, some water, and I use a mortar and pestle for the Italian seasoning because I'm doing things the hard way, but you don't really need that.
You need some olive oil and that's about it. I've got a cup of coffee that helps and a cat name race car that doesn't.
So I guess we should start. I'm going to, I've already trimmed the ends off the zucchini, otherwise that's going to be shredded later.
So I'm going to start with the shallot. And while I'm preparing that, I'm going to explain what a shallot is because we had no idea until we started getting hello fresh.
And a shallot is just a tiny onion, really. It's more flavorful. So it's got a richer flavor. It's not really as acidic. I don't feel as some of the other onion varieties.
But if you didn't have a shallot or just wanted to use up a yellow onion or something, that would be fine. You could probably even get away with a white onion.
I wouldn't use red, but that's mostly personal preference.
So shallots are really nice. They're nice and tiny so you don't have leftovers. I put the whole shallot into the recipe, but it only calls for half.
Okay, this one's got a little bit of yuck on the outer shell. So I'm going to see if I can get that off.
That's been a benefit of this whole hello fresh services. It's exposing us to different techniques and different types of food that ordinarily we haven't tried on our own.
And we're pretty adventurous when it comes to eating out a restaurant, some things.
So let's get this shallot all set.
I'm also not entirely sure how much of this is going to come through onto the recording. So you might be hearing the chopping that I'm doing.
You might be hearing me peel the outer layers off the shallot because it's just like an onion.
It also doesn't make me tear up as much. I am terrible, terrible with onions.
As soon as someone's cutting one anywhere in the house, I notice. So shallots aren't as bad.
It's been stubborn about peeling though.
Let's see. There we go. That's better.
Okay, so that's half the shallot.
Let's get this guy trimmed too.
It didn't happen with the shallots we got from Hello Fresh, but this one and many of the ones I get from the grocery store have two distinct like inner cores.
Almost like there was two that grew as a unit as in the field.
So let me just chop these guy up.
I'm not sure if I'm supposed to mince or chop these. Let me double check mince.
Once you've got your shallot trimmed and clean, mince it up into really tiny little pieces if you can.
It doesn't matter all that much. If you like bigger pieces, you can leave it a little bigger, but it really blends in well if you chop it up.
Doesn't affect me as much, but still a little bit.
Let's get mince up.
While that's going on, I'm also going to set my oven to 500 degrees.
Usually because it's me, I wait because I am very slow and delivered when it comes to cooking.
Okay, there is my shallot minced up.
Okay, now I've got to get some olive oil going in my largest pan or skillet on medium heat and that's going to be used to cook the sausage.
Let me cut open the sausage packing because I went cheap and easy and got the shrink wrap stuff at the grocery store.
Also, there's two types of sausage. There's sausage that's already in like link casing, so they look like hot dogs or kind of brought worse that you're used to seeing.
And then there's loose sausage, which is what this recipe calls for and it's much easier to use in this scenario.
So make sure to get it loose throughout you'll have to remove it from the casings, which is no fun.
Get this oil spread around.
Okay, and sausage in.
Now the way it's used in this recipe, we kind of have to grab a wooden spoon or something and break it into pieces.
So I usually do maybe a centimeter to a quarter inch sized pieces.
Again, most of the personal preference, it's going to be mixed into a pasta dish.
So if you wanted bigger pieces, I'm sure you could get away with it.
Also, I've noticed that the pork sausage I'm using is much saltier than the chicken sausage that they sent us with the recipe.
So there's been a couple places in the recipe where they say to add salt and salt things and ice, give it.
Because you can always add salt afterwards if you prefer that.
But the sausage comes with a lot of extra flavor and saltiness.
So I don't want to overdo it because you can always add more, but you can never suck it out.
I don't think you can.
If you know a way, post an episode about it because that sounds crazy.
There we go.
I'm just starting to get going here.
So I'm just mashing this sausage into little tiny pieces in the frying pan and keeping them spooned around to make sure that they get done all the way through.
While I'm doing that, I am supposed to be adding Italian seasoning to this, but I haven't made it yet.
So I'm going to go grab some seasonings.
Now because I'm at goofball, I don't have Italian seasoning. I just have seasons.
I don't even know what's supposed to go into Italian seasoning.
So what I'm doing is I'm grinding up some rosemary, some thyme.
I'm adding a little powdered oregano because I don't have any non-pol oregano or whole oregano.
And I might even throw in some fennel seeds for fun.
I don't know how much of that is supposed to be in Italian seasoning, but I don't know.
I've eaten a lot of really good Italian food and this seems to work okay in this recipe.
So I'm going to go with it.
I might even add some black pepper because that always spices things up a little bit.
Let's see, where's everything else?
Okay, that's our rosemary thyme and fennel in.
I'm going to wait on the oregano.
I also have some fresh basil that I might chop up and try later because you know,
basil is supposed to be fresh as a season and it's spicy basil.
So I don't know how it would taste in this recipe.
And I don't want to risk messing the whole thing up.
I don't know if you can actually hear that, but I'm going to put the phone closer to the mortar and pestle.
That's about ground up.
It smells interesting.
I don't know if the fennel is a great idea, but better stir my sausage.
Oh!
Alright, add in a little bit of the oregano.
Mix it all together.
Now I put half of the Italian seasoning that I made, which is supposed to be.
I don't think they even have a listing of how much Italian seasoning was supposed to go in.
So I usually just make a tablespoon or two and then I put half of it in the sausage and save the other half for later.
Let's mix that guy up.
Make sure it gets everywhere it needs to be.
Oh, I think this goes without saying, but there's also a couple different types of sausage.
Like you can get breakfast sausage, you can get mild sausage, you can get spicy sausage.
I usually go with mild, because I don't know, just what I've become accustomed to, if it's well with the recipe.
If you like spicier, go for hot.
I don't think it would take anything away.
Let's see.
Okay, when this sausage is done, we have to transfer it to the mixing bowl lined with paper towels.
So I usually drain some of the grease out of it before it goes in, but they use that paper towel bowl to get rid of a lot of the excess liquid from some of the ingredients, which makes sense.
These guys are about finished and they're going to get cooked later along with everything else anyways.
Let's turn that off.
Let's drain our fat into a can for use or disposal later.
Okay, sausage transferred.
Now, the next step is to cook the zucchini.
So we need to add some extra oil so the zucchini doesn't stick to the pan.
And then in the original recipe they had you shred it ahead of time, but I just shred it straight into the pan. It seems to be easier.
So get my zucchini and the cheese grater, which is underneath me.
All right, we'll turn on the stove again and start creating.
For those who are kind of on the fence about zucchini, I live with one of you and she does not mind at all the zucchini in this recipe.
It's one of those things where it just absorbs the flavor of everything else and kind of becomes just a carrier for the flavor.
So it's a nice way to get healthy vegetables into you without tasting healthy vegetables if you don't like that kind of thing.
And zucchini is a weird vegetable, so I don't blame you.
Almost there.
Oh, come on. It will slip near the end.
There we go.
Put the rest of that in my compost.
Oh dear.
Okay, so you end up cooking this until the zucchini is tender and is shrunk by about a third, which takes five minutes around.
Usually I find my steps taking a little bit longer, but like I said, I'm slow and I like to make sure things are very well cooked.
Oh, I am supposed to add the shallot into here as well.
So I'm going to take the shallot I missed earlier, toss it right in.
Okay, and this is one of the steps where it says season the salt that I am going to ignore.
We don't need a salt right now.
That shallot has given fragrance.
They're interesting, little creatures these shallots.
They taste very flavorful, and they're the perfect size for making this kind of thing.
Maybe turn up the heat a little bit.
It does say season with salt and pepper, but this is cooking, so I am going to throw a little bit of pepper in there.
There we go.
Now mix it a little bit.
It's already starting to shrink up and soften up.
I do want the zucchini to get smaller and the shallot to just soften up a bit.
Okay, and I'm going to get our paper towel ready, because after this is done cooking, we need to wipe out the pan.
Because it's going to be used for something else.
The orzo, of course.
Keep stirring that guy.
Use this as an opportunity to get some more coffee.
Oh, it's starting to smell good.
I wonder if making you hungry qualifies me for the explicit tack.
Okay, that looks just about done.
It might let it sit for another minute or so, but it seems to be very good.
And then we're going to start the orzato parts.
So usually when you can't just cook rice or pasta straight in a pan.
You need to add some sort of oil or buffer to keep it from sticking and to make sure it, like, cooks evenly, I suppose.
So the one that they call for is butter. They want you to melt a teaspoon of butter into the pan.
That is after I've wiped it out.
Let me get my paper towel.
Okay, that's butter as good as it gets.
So I'm going to take my tablespoon of butter, flop it in the pan, let it melt around a little bit.
Once it is good and melted, I'm going to measure out my cup and a half of orzo.
One of the only problems I have with orzo pasta is it is tiny enough that it sneaks through the seals in the box, like sugar does and flour does.
So that as soon as you pick up a package of orzo, there's little orzo pasta everywhere.
It just starts pouring out of the seams.
But as downsides go, that's not the worst one.
Okay, that's one cup.
I'm going to turn the stove back on.
Okay, I'm going to dump that in, stir it up a little bit.
So if you're doing it right, the pasta or rice gets this nice golden coat.
Okay, all the pasta is in, so you just pretty much stir it consistently.
It's not something you want to leave lying around or else the pasta might get synched or whatever.
You only keep it on the heat for two to three minutes.
I don't actually know scientifically what makes this work.
If it's heating it up, let makes it more susceptible to water or actually cooks the pasta while it's still dry, so it can absorb more.
I don't know.
If you know, maybe you should record an episode and tell me.
Or maybe you've already recorded an episode and it's in my backlog.
In that case, thanks.
Okay, this is starting to look pretty good.
Doesn't really change a lot in appearance, but I usually just let it go two and a half, three minutes.
And then say, that's great.
And then pour in all the extra ingredients.
So once you've primed the orzo in that way, you have to add water.
The stock comes great.
So if you just had a cup and a half of stock, that would probably work too.
The rest of the Italian seasoning.
I'm going to dump that in now too.
And this is when I put in my either half or whole can of tomatoes, depending on how things are going.
I put in most of it, but I'm going to save some.
Let me go grab my stock concentrate from the fridge.
Also, if you only take one thing away from this episode, make it stock concentrate.
It comes in a little jar and I don't know how it stacks up price-wise to actual chicken stock or beef stock.
But it's so much nicer to store and it's so much better for shipping, I don't imagine.
Because you just have to ship the concentrate instead of all the water that comes with it.
So yeah, I highly recommend if you do a lot of cooking with chicken stock, switch to concentrate if you can.
I don't know if it's if purest wouldn't like the flavor after it's been reconstituted, but it suits me just fine.
You can also use it for chicken broth if you're not too picky about what your broth tastes like by just diluting it by a half or a third of the concentration.
So if you make your chicken stock with a tablespoon of stock concentrate per two cups, you just use maybe a teaspoon or even less.
And it comes out working out pretty well.
Okay, so we've got tomatoes and orzo and Italian seasoning and stock concentrate and water all kind of simmering in this pan.
So you bring it to a boil and once it does or it boils, you just stir it every once in a while until the orzo is done.
The recipe says 12 minutes, but who knows.
Often if I have misjudged the amount of stuff I've put in, I need to add extra water before the orzo is finished, but it's not a real big deal.
Stir more frequently.
Seems like some of my orzo is getting stuck to the bottom of the pan because he turned up the heat.
So it's about eight minutes in and the orzo is still pretty crunchy, but most of the water has been used up.
So I'm going to add in another half cup of water to see if we can give it something to drink.
I suppose what I should do is in the show notes, update that one and a half cups of chicken stock or water with chicken stock concentrate to two cups.
I'm also going to try and do metric conversions, but I have never cooked in metric and I'm not entirely sure how it would turn out.
So if you're following the recipe from the show notes and you're using metric measurements, be at your discretion because I don't know what I'm doing.
Clean up a little bit because why not?
Okay, that's been 12 minutes.
So it's still a little wet.
I'm going to try the pasta see if it still has some more moisture to absorb or if it's truly done.
It's a pretty okay consistency.
It could use a little bit more water so I'm going to let it firm up either as much moisture as it wants.
Speaking of moisture, the next step is to drain all of the extra moisture from the zucchini and sausage that we prepared earlier.
So I'm going to grab that dish and see if I can get any water out of it into the sink.
It's lined with a paper towel, but that usually tears through so heads up.
Just a couple of drips. That's not a big deal.
Okay, so there wasn't much moisture in there anyways. I'm not going to worry about it.
So I'm going to mix those ingredients, the sausage, the zucchini, and the orzo that's been simmering all into the one big pan, which is why I used the big pan.
I've made that mistake on multiple occasions and needed to switch up in the middle of the recipe and that is lousy, so don't do it.
Okay, let's get those in there, shake it out a little bit.
It's a little tricky with the paper towel, but not terribly difficult.
Most of this recipe is pretty easy considering that I'm doing it myself.
Okay, let's mix these in. I'm going to turn on the heat a little bit.
It also calls for another tablespoon of butter to be mixed into the final result in the pan.
It says you should season the whole dish with salt and pepper, so I'm going to add some more pepper, but I'm going to leave out the salt because of reasons I discussed previously.
Oh man, I'm going to have to take a picture of this before we eat it because it just looks really good too. It's such a good recipe.
It's a very colorful, very bright, fresh dish.
It tastes really awesome.
It's just hard to complain, you know.
I'm mixing in the newly added butter and pepper.
And to be quite honest, there's another step to this recipe, but I would eat this as it.
It looks very good. It's fully flavored, but...
Oh, haha. So there's a trick I missed.
They say that you should preheat the oven to 500 degrees.
I most certainly did not, so there's going to be a little bit of a gap before I get to finish this thing.
So now I'm preheating the oven.
Pasta is pretty much done, so I'm going to take a picture of it.
Okay, you're coming along with the ride because I'm recording with my phone.
There's our pasta or zato.
So while the oven's preheating, I'm going to get everything set up.
If you've got it in an oven-proof pan, like if you have a cast iron pan that you've been using, great.
You can do this without transferring to another pan. It's just good to go.
I do not have that luxury, so I'm going to put it in a casserole dish.
Here we go.
Plop, plop, plop, plop.
Now like the pan, I had to use the big casserole dish.
This one's 13 inches by 9 inches.
Again, I'm not sure what it is in metric. I'll have to do some conversions and see.
But once it's transferred into the pan, what you do is you put on mozzarella cheese and panko bread crumbs as kind of a topper.
I put the bread crumbs on first and then the mozzarella cheese, but you could also mix them.
Wait, that's a lie. I put on the cheese first and then the bread crumbs, so the bread crumbs can get toasty.
I didn't mean to deceive you. I hope you didn't just mess up your dinner.
So they probably have a amount of mozzarella cheese that you're supposed to put on the top, but I just coat the whole thing.
I use a whole eight ounce, I guess that'd be one cup or in metric, 226 grams.
That seems very arbitrary, but I just use the whole thing and it coats the whole pan very nicely.
And then I just sprinkle bread crumbs enough on top to kind of coat and they get nice and toasty and crunchy.
Okay, so that's essentially it. Once you've got that in the pan, you have to put the whole pan in the oven for only two to three minutes so that the cheese melts and it gets nice and crispy on the top.
And then you dish it out and serve it. It's a delicious dish. It's pretty easy to do. It's very resilient and forgiving of mistakes.
So I highly recommend it if you need something to eat tonight.
So I'm not going to make you wait through me putting it in the oven, so I'm going to sign off.
This has been Windigo and I hope you enjoy whatever you're eating tonight.
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