Round and round pasta

We saw this pasta recipe on an episode of Giada at Home and it looked like a good springtime meal.  It turned out to be an interesting mashup of flavours and included our new favourite summer produce: zucchini and summer squash.  It also gave us an excuse to buy mascarpone.

Our notes:

• This recipe took a lot of time to prepare: cooking, cooling, and slicing sausages; slicing shallots; slicing carrots; slicing zucchini and summer squash; slicing tomatoes; mixing the dressing.  The given prep time of 10 minutes seems a bit on the optimistic side, though I suppose once everything is chopped the actual cooking doesn't take too long.
• I had cooked the sausage long before Dom got home so that it would have enough time to cool.  This saved time later, but it's my opinion that this recipe is not for those who work full time.  Maybe on weekends or something but definitely not for a weekday.
• Because we had only decided to make this earlier that day, the sausages were still frozen.  I cooked them on low heat in a covered skillet with about 1/2" of water, and kept checking on them for 15-20 minutes.  Worked great.
• Even with "medium" zucchini, 1/2" slices seemed rather hefty.  Though it would destroy the aesthetic of having all round items in the dish, I'd probably cut each piece of zucchini in half or quarters to get bite-sized pieces.  Either that or buy tiny zucchini.  (Side note: the photograph at the recipe's webpage has zucchini slices about the same size around as the pasta, and not as thick.  This was NOT reflected in the recipe's numbers.)
• I would use more than a 1/4 cup of orange juice for the cooked zucchini.  This barely covered the bottom of the pan and there wasn't a whole lot left after the "cook until the juice thickens" step.  Yes, I know it doesn't say "reduce" so I kept vigilant watch over it.
• The recipe calls for rotelle (wagon wheels), but I bought ditalini as our local Kroger doesn't have rotelle.  I always forget just how much volume a pound of ditalini takes up versus a pound of a larger pasta, and mixing together all of the ingredients was a bit dicey even in the pasta serving bowl that we have.  Guess we should just get penne next time if we don't have time to hunt down rotelle--the sauce-to-pasta ratio would probably be a little better with larger pasta.
• Perhaps I didn't allow enough time for the mascarpone to come to room temperature, but there was no way that stuff was going to be whisked, much less "poured" over the finished pasta.  However, the 'dressing', as it were, of mascarpone, lemon juice, and salt, was really quite delicious (once I worked it into the pasta) and provided a nice salty-and-sour contrast to the hint of orange juice that the zucchini had been cooked in.  We actually cut down the amount of salt in the dressing to about 1/2 teaspoon as a full teaspoon seemed excessive.
• Speaking of mascarpone, hearing someone say it "mars-ca-pone", in the same way that people pronounce my name as "Carolyn", sort of irritates me.  (It's closer to "mas-car-pone-eh", and my name is not "Carolyn" in the same sense that it isn't "Marie" or "Jordan".)  Since I've learned over the years that no one likes a know-it-all and since this really isn't a big deal in any case, I usually just brush it off and ignore the momentary and slight rise in blood pressure.  So to save myself a little hypertension, whenever someone pronounces it "mars-ca-pone", I'll just pretend that they're referring to that rum-running Capone family of Mars.  They've got an in with Starfleet, you know.

So all in all, this was a relatively labour-intensive dinner and it's not a good hot-weather dish only in that it requires three different uses of the stove.  However, it was very tasty and the end result was a not-too-heavy springtime dinner that we'll probably end up making again sometime--it'd be a great make-ahead dish as the flavours get better with a little time.

Avocados and pasta: a winning combination