Rigatoni with sausage and zucchini

January 22, 2025 2:09 PM

Last year was a really busy year, and I often got stressed out over what to cook. One of my friends was regularly ordering from HelloFresh, and I also got a box every once in a while. It was nice to not have to think about what I was going to cook, but man was it expensive. And that's even after I had 50% off and I wasn't paying for shipping. It also came with way too much packaging.

But I did really enjoy one of the recipes so much that it's become one of my go tos: Pork Sausage Rigatoni Rosa. I think that name makes it sound way fancier than it is. It's basically another one of those tomato-y cream cheese pastas, and if you've been following this blog you know that I love putting cream cheese in pasta.

If you click on the recipe link, you'll notice that there are certain ingredients that don't exactly have a real measurement. The recipe calls for "1 unit" of zucchini, tomato paste, and chicken stock concentrate. Okay, the zucchini is simple enough, it's literally one zucchini, but what is 1 unit of tomato paste?!

Well, I've made this enough times and I've written down all the real measurements on my paper version of this. I've also modified this recipe to my own tastes. I find that HelloFresh usually includes more meat than I care for, and not enough of anything else.

• I use 8 oz (rather than 6 oz) of pasta
• I also use two zucchinis because I can't buy a single zucchini from Aldi. But also because it's good to eat a lot of veggies!
• I lower the amount of sausage to half a pound
• 1.5 oz (or ~3 tablespoons) of tomato paste and 1 tsp of Better than Bouillon chicken stock concentrate

I also found that I get a little flail-y when I've made this in the past. There's one step when it tells you to add cream cheese, stock concentrate, pasta water, butter, sugar, and chili flakes all at once and I am never ready for that. I always ended up running around my kitchen grabbing each item--meanwhile, my tomato paste is starting to burn in the pan. So this time I measured and put every ingredient out before I started cooking.

I was much less flail-y today! I think I made the pasta a little too al dente, but that's alright, that means the leftovers will still taste good.