Steve, you know that the name "orzo" means rice, don't you?

A Lebanese friend showed me how she cooks rice with orzo.

With a little olive oil in a heated pan, she puts the orzo portion of the recipe in and stirs it to brown it. I'd say I use 1/4 cup of orzo with every cup of rice. Brown the orzo and once it is the color you want then pour in the dry rice (or wet if you washed it) and stir it around enough to heat the rice up, then pour in the water, cover, and cook. The orzo is a nice brown accent in the white rice when it's finished.

A variant on that is the Basmati rice I cook with vermicelli, doing the same thing so the pasta is a browned accent in the long-grain rice. This is probably the progenitor of the box mix "Rice-a-roni," that uses rice and vermicelli and a chicken bouillon cube.