Creamy Butternut Squash Orzo with Sausage is the ultimate Fall dinner: creamy, comforting, and delicious. This simple recipe is so easy to make - it will surely become one of your favorite family dinners!
Remove the sausage from casings, and slice the sausage. Heat 1 tablespoon of olive oil on medium heat in a large, high-sided skillet.
Add sliced sausage and cook on medium heat for about 4 minutes on one side, without turning, to get the sausage slices browned. Flip over to the other side and cook for 2 more minutes.
Make creamy butternut squash sauce
To the same skillet with sausage, add heavy cream, chicken stock, butternut squash puree, and minced garlic.
Bring the sauce to a boil on medium heat, reduce to low-medium heat, stir everything well. Cook for about 5 or more minutes. Make sure the garlic is cooked to your liking, and the sauce thickens. Cook longer if you would like a thicker sauce. Remove from heat.
While the sauce cooks for 5 or more minutes, cook the orzo as described below.
Cook orzo
Bring a pot of water to boil. Cook orzo according to package instructions. In my case, I cooked orzo al dente for 7 minutes in a pot of boiling water. Remove from heat. Drain but do not rinse.
Assembly
Add cooked orzo to the skillet with creamy butternut squash and sausage. Stir in half of the fresh sage and half of the fresh thyme.
Cook over medium-high heat for 2 minutes. Remove from heat.
Season with salt and freshly ground coarse black pepper.
Tip: use your best judgment about the salt. If the sausage is salty enough, you might not need to add any extra salt.
When serving, top with the remaining half of the fresh sage and the remaining half of the fresh thyme.
Notes
The total cooking time does not include the time required for roasting the butternut squash and making the butternut squash puree. I recommend that you do that in advance.
Refrigerate or freeze the leftover butternut squash puree in an airtight container. Because you will be roasting whole butternut squash, you will have more than you need (1 cup) for this recipe.
If you don't have fresh thyme use dried thyme. Use ½ teaspoon of dried thyme (not powdered) or ¼ teaspoon of powdered dried thyme.
Italian sausage. I used 3 links of spicy Italian sausage. You can also use sweet or mild Italian sausage.
Remove the casings. I removed the casings and sliced the sausage. I prefer the texture of the sausage without the casings so I recommend this step