I am a fairly good cook now, but I prefer recipes that need little kitchen time and few ingredients. I don’t care if it takes 4 hours to cook, so long as I don’t have to spend more than 10 minutes in the kitchen. So in this blog I only write about stuff that is easy to make and doesn’t require a large commitment. Here’s my recipe for pork/rice with paprika. This is easily a main course for any meal.

Ingredients

• pork tenderloin: 2 pounds, defrosted
• rice: 1.5 cups, extra long grain, preferably basmati
• powdered paprika: about 2 heaped teaspoons
• powdered cumin: 1 teaspoon
• garlic powder: half a teaspoon
• ginger powder: half a teaspoon
• freshly cracked black pepper: half a teaspoon
• salt: to taste (I usually add 1-1.5 teaspoons)
• 2-3 medium onions, chopped
• 2-3 large green bell peppers, seeds removed, and chopped
• a couple teaspoons of oil: olive oil or canola
• 1 – 1.5 sticks of butter

Method

Start by turning on the oven to 450 degrees, and let the rice soak in a large pot with at least 2 inches of cold water covering it.

In a small bowl, mix all the dry spices and salt. Add enough oil to make a paste. Canola oil is best because of the high oven temperature, though you can use olive oil if you wish. Wash the pork tenderloins in cold running water, pat them completely dry with paper towels. Usually, tenderloins are sold in pairs, so a 2 pound package will have 2 tenderloins of approximately 1 pound each.

Put them in a roasting pan, and spoon the spice/oil mixture over them carefully. Spread the spice/oil paste until it completely covers the surface of the meat, making sure to baste both sides. Then adjust the tenderloins in the roasting pan so that they are about an inch apart, and the fat side is up. Pork tenderloins have very little fat, but they have a silvery membrane with a tiny bit of fat in it. You don’t have to remove the membrane, just put them with whichever side has more of the silvery stuff facing up. Make sure the tenderloins aren’t poking over the edge of the pan – if they are too long for the pan, fold the thinner end under itself so they fit within the pan.

After the oven has preheated to 450 F (the amount of time this can take varies with the oven, it will be at least 15 minutes if not more), put the pan with the tenderloins on a rack in the center of the oven, uncovered. Set the timer for 15 minutes at 450 F, to give the meat time to brown. After 15 minutes, turn the oven down to 250 F. Continue cooking until the internal temperature of the meat reaches about 150 F. This usually takes about an hour at 250 F (not counting the first 15 minutes at 450 F). Don’t cook any longer than an hour at 250 F, or the tenderloins will dry out — remember, tenderloins have very little fat and can easily get dry if you overcook them. After they have cooked, remove the pan from the oven and let it sit on a counter for at least 15 minutes before messing with it any further.

While the tenderloins are cooking, cook the rice. Make sure it’s soaked for at least 30 minutes (45 minutes is better). Then wash the rice in 2-3 changes of cold water. Drain the water, then add a measured 2 cups of cold water to it. Bring it to a boil, then turn the heat to low, cover the pot, and let it cook for 25 minutes. After it’s cooked, remove it from the stove and let it cool down – with the lid on. Do not remove the lid to speed up cooling. It should be allowed to cool for at least 15 minutes before it’s used further.

Melt the butter in a large skillet (has to be large, eventually the rice will be dumped here as well, later in the recipe). Add the chopped onions and chopped green bell peppers, and let them fry in the hot butter until they are slightly brown.

At this point, you could add other spices to the frying onions if you wished. I sometimes add crushed dry red pepper, and some Indian spices, but they are not necessary.

If you time things right, the onions and peppers will finish frying about 15 minutes after the pork tenderloins are done and the rice is cooked. It’s important that both the tenderloins and the rice be allowed to cool on a counter for at least 15 minutes after removing from the stove or oven, before you use them further in the recipe.

Cut the tenderloins into small cubes (I prefer them really small, like quarter-inch cubes), and toss them in the pot with the onions and green peppers. There will be some fat that has drained out into the roasting pan. It’s not a lot, and it’s very flavorful. If you like, you can drain this fat directly into the skillet with the onions as well. If you’re trying to cut down on fat, oh well, don’t bother. Stir everything around for a minute or two.

Finally, dump the rice into the skillet. Turn the heat down to medium-low, stir occasionally to mix the rice in with the meat and fried onions/peppers/spices. The goal is the mix everything thoroughly, to coat the rice grains with butter from the pan so they don’t stick together. It’s now ready to serve.

Just before serving, I like to make a final check on the salt. If you had about 1.5 teaspoons of salt in the original spice rub used for the meat, and if you didn’t toss the liquid that drained out into the roasting pan, but added it to the skillet along with the rice, then you should have enough salt in the prepared dish. But if you tossed the roasting liquid or didn’t have enough salt to begin with, you might want to add a bit more to the skillet at this time. At any rate, you must check for salt before serving, very likely it will need some adjustment. The easiest way to ruin a dish, specially a meat dish, is to not have enough salt. Salt brings out the flavors in meat. I also add some chopped cilantro right before serving, but that’s optional. Mix it all up and serve hot.

Makes about 3-4 servings for hungry adult males. More, if you’re a girl.

Notes

This is very much “comfort food”, which I identify as basically any form of meat (roasted is more “comforty”) plus a starch, suitably salted. The starch could be rice or potatoes, both have their uses. This sort of food has a very primal appeal to our taste buds, possibly going back to when our ancestors first discovered the miracle of cooking, roasting meats and roots at their campfires. Onions and garlic and their botanical kin were probably among the first flavors to be added to food. This is an extra dimension that food holds for me, to be able to use it as a means to relate to our ancestors, to see and smell and taste what they did. Historical food has the same attraction, which is why I sometimes try out historical recipes from Roman times, or medieval food.

Like most stuff with spices, this can be easily refrigerated. If you are cooking for one, simply divide it up into portions in ziplock bags. It easily lasts 2-4 days in the refrigerator. Just nuke it in a microwave before serving.

Learning how to add salt is one of the earliest cooking skills that needs to be mastered. Unless you are following a recipe exactly, you’ll have to make a decision about how much salt to add. This is not a trivial decision; it’s one of the most important things you can do to enhance or ruin the flavor of food.

There is no exact science to it. Use good salt. Iodized salt sucks. I prefer kosher salt for general use, sea salt for specific recipes. Start by tasting whatever you intend to salt, to get a “baseline flavor”. Add salt sparingly, in steps. You can always add more, but taking it away is harder. Don’t dump it on to one spot in the food, sprinkle it evenly across all the food, then mix thoroughly and taste it. Does it taste better than the “baseline” taste? How does it taste different? You sort of have to learn this for yourself, because no one can explain to anyone else what “properly salted” ought to taste like. You have to experience it yourself. Adding salt in steps, a little bit at a time, then checking the taste, is the surest way to learn. After some time, you’ll be able to taste the food once, eyeball the amount of food, and know how much salt to add without measuring a damn thing. But it takes a little bit of practice. To me, the ideal amount of salt is that which makes the food just short of salty. Meaning, I shouldn’t be able to taste the salt specifically (unless I’m eating potato chips), but the flavors in the food should be maximally developed by the salt. You may prefer a bit more, but you will very likely not prefer less. Just experiment a bit and see what you like.

I’ve come across a number of articles that talk about the importance of a change in diet in human evolution. The theory is that human diet suddenly improved dramatically, and this marked increase in the availability of calories and nutrients was responsible for the growth of the brain. The improvement in diet is generally tied to either the switch from a primarily herbivorous diet to meat eating, and/or to cooking.

Both make sense in terms of calories and nutrients. Meat is certainly a more densely packed source of nutrients than plants. And cooking increases the bioavailability of nutrients, as it breaks up cell walls and structures that hinder our digestive enzymes from reaching the goodies inside cells.

Of course, this still leaves us without an actual mechanism. Evolution requires heritable changes in the genome. These happen largely by  accident, though their selection depends upon what is advantageous to survival and reproduction. At this point, we don’t know very well exactly which genes are responsible for the differences in our brains, say compared to chimpanzees. We don’t know when these changes first appeared. We don’t know what connection they have to an improved diet.

So one part of evolution, that which is related to the genomic changes responsible for our large brains, is mostly unknown to us. Therefore, I think that ideas such as the change-in-diet leading to big brains scenario, tend to ignore the unknowns and focus only on the natural selection side of evolution. They make certain assumptions, for example, that a large brain will be selected, because it enhances survival and the chance to reproduce. This can be somewhat justified if one thinks about  it (large brains, specially the growth of the forebrain is what allows us to make long range plans, analyze complex problems, etc.), and also there is fossil evidence that shows that in fact it was selected. Then there is the assumption that a large brain requires a nutrient rich diet, which can also be justified on the basis of the caloric expenditure in maintaining a large brain. A commonly offered statistic is that for a person at rest, of the amount of energy required to stay alive, the brain uses 20%, or 1/5th. The brain is obviously much less than a fifth of the body in terms of mass, yet it uses an extraordinary amount of energy, in proportion. If you keep the total mass of an organism constant, but increase the size of the brain in proportion to the rest of its body, then such an organism will require a more nutrient rich diet. In effect, you have increased its energy requirements, but have not given it bigger jaws to chew food, a bigger gut to digest it, bigger claws to hunt with, etc.

In fact, both anatomy and the fossil record show that humans became less capable of acquiring food as their brains grew, if we look solely at such biological markers such as tooth/jaw size. Homo erectus had smaller jaws than his ancestors, which would have made it harder for him to grind foods down and extract the most energy from them. Our gut became smaller, and less capable of extracting energy from plants. Our muscles became weaker, less capable of overpowering other animals through brute strength alone.
One would think that the timing of these changes would have some correlation with our behavior or change in diet, or the control of fire (for cooking). Unfortunately, the timing is much harder to pin down. No one really knows when humans first learned to control fire. Homo erectus, with his small jaws, evolved 2 million years ago, but the evidence for the widespread use of fire by humans at this time is scanty at best. Most anthropologists don’t believe that fire was used by humans this early, at least, not in any regular, controlled manner, such as would be needed for cooking. Soft tissues don’t fossilize well, so while we can study humans and chimps today and recognize that the chimp gut is much more suited for eating raw plant material than the human gut, we don’t really know when we evolved our more carnivorous digestive systems.

This leaves a chicken versus egg conundrum. Which came first, the big brain or the adaptations to the big brain lifestyle? Which was responsible for the other? This may be a silly question on the face of it, because obviously one is useless without the other. What’s the point of having a modern jaw or gut if you don’t also have the bigger brains that give you the means for filling that gut with food? On the other hand, how do you sustain that brain and give it energy without eating a more nutrient-rich diet?

So it seems that speaking in terms of absolute causality, one thing causing the other is somewhat simplistic. They probably both happened together, one reinforcing the other, and happened gradually. We didn’t go suddenly from a chimp-sized brain to a human-sized one, as we know from the fossil record. There are many intermediate stages of the brain growing progressively larger. The change in diet, therefore, and the behavioral changes accompanying both the change in diet and the larger brain, must have happened concomitantly.

It’s interesting at this point to bring in the factor we’ve ignored all along – that there must be genomic changes that produce all the anatomical differences – jaws, teeth, gut and brains. These genomic changes also need to be accounted for, and tied into the selection mechanism. A high nutrient diet is obviously not enough; otherwise large cats such as lions and tigers would be smarter than us. They might not cook, but they eat enough high nutrient food to be able to support bigger brains. They have evolved as long as us, why didn’t they learn to cook,  why didn’t they evolve bigger brains?

This brings us back to selection, and fuzzier areas of anthropology such as social behavior and interactions, etc. We have bred dogs for a few thousand years, for example, and we have breeds of dogs today that look very different from each other. Not only is there is a difference in size and color of the fur, but there are also differences in the brain. Some breeds of dogs are smarter than others. We did this by a fairly simple process of selection – pick dogs that have the traits you want, breed them to produce a new generation, keep selecting for the desirable traits and reinforcing them through successive generations. Even with no knowledge of DNA or even Mendellian genetics, our ancestors were able to do this for dogs. We have also bred cows, pigs, goats, sheep, etc. – the modern domesticated forms of which are quite different from their wild ancestors. Not to mention the similar and parallel process of breeding food plants.

So even without postulating major and sudden changes in the genome, those which suddenly introduced a “game changer” mutation so far as the brain was concerned, it’s possible to see that humans could have become progressively smarter simply if the natural variation in smartness among a population was selectively reinforced over generations, the same way we breed dogs. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you can breed dogs to a human level of intelligence, there may well be certain required mutations, and these have to happen first. You can’t select for what doesn’t exist. But at a point where we don’t fully understand the nature of these key mutations, we can’t really talk about how essential they were. Perhaps they could happen in other species too. Perhaps there are a dozen different ways to get the same result, and if mutation “A” doesn’t happen, mutation “X” can provide the similar benefits. I’d rather not speculate about this until we have more information to speculate with.

So I think such articles (as the one referenced above, which talks about the relation of diet to human evolution) speculate about the remainder of the problem, the mutually reinforcing effect of the selection of traits which are part of the natural variability of a population, and the behavioral consequences of selecting such traits. You set a species on a certain path, on which a greater reliance on the brain cuts out some options while expanding others, and the options that are promoted require even greater brain power to work well. It’s interesting to speculate what put us on this path, why we seem to be the only species on it. What set of circumstances came together at the right time for this to happen. The drying climate and spread of grasslands, the change from an arboreal to a savannah type lifestyle, the appearance of bipedality at this critical juncture when these big new ecological niches suddenly opened up, the development of more and more hand flexibility with a greater range of movement in the opposable thumb (compared to other primates), the social interactions, etc. There were so many changes happening at roughly the same time to the same species, somewhere this set us off on a path to bigger brains.

The article that set me off on this line of thought, of course, talks about something narrower. It talks about the relationship of cooking to gender roles, the development of the male-female bond, which is marriage today. This seems less an evolutionary question than an anthropological one. The evolutionary part is the importance of cooked food in the development of our brains, which I have speculated about. The anthropology part is relating this importance to something else, namely male-female pairing. I am not qualified to speculate about the anecdotal evidence offered about some primitive societies where food is more important than marital fidelity. Nor do I have any evidence that women tended the home fires, though it seems likely if men were the hunters and spent less time at the home camp. This seems to be supported by fossil evidence, such as hunting related injuries, as well as by anthropological evidence. You can speculate that the importance of cooked food was critical enough to shape our behavior patterns in other ways, such as pair-bonding between males and females. But just because a theory seems to make sense doesn’t mean it’s true, so I guess we’ll need to see some more physical evidence before placing much value on it.