Pork and Rice with Vegetables and Spices

Name: Pork and Rice with Vegetables and Spices
Prep time: 15 min
Cook time: 30 min
Total time: 45 min
Cuisine: European
Ingredients: Pork 250 g; Basmati rice 1 cup (180 g); Onion 1; Garlic 1 head; Carrot 1; Vegetable oil 4-5 tbsp; Ground coriander, ground black pepper, sweet paprika, hot pepper, salt, saffron (marigold petals) Spices:

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45 mins

Before a working day starts, it’s always worth having a good, hearty breakfast. Smart people say breakfast is the most important meal of the day. In the bustle of a working day, lunch is rarely a proper meal.

And dinner, because of tiredness, is almost out of the question. So breakfast has to be good and tasty. Remember? Proteins, fats, carbohydrates. In that sense pork with rice is ideal for breakfast. First, it cooks fairly quickly and doesn’t need much attention. Second, it has everything you need for a complete meal. And third, it’s a very tasty dish.

Rice is an amazing grain. The word sounds almost the same, or similar, in most languages of the world. Rice is a cereal, the source of those white grains. Though in fact rice becomes white only after polishing; in its natural state it is gray or brown, or even black.

Two centuries ago the word “rice” was unknown in our parts. People said “Saracen grain” or “Saracen millet”. Yet rice was domesticated more than 10 thousand years ago. Today rice is the world’s main staple grain, the basis of many regional and national cuisines. Remarkably, in Japanese “cooked rice”, gohan, literally means “the main food”. Although there, chicken is a side dish to rice, not the other way around.

For us rice is not the main food. Usually it is boiled into porridge or served as a side dish. And of course it is used for pilaf, although only a handful of people can make pilaf properly.

I always say: don’t make a bad pilaf, make a good, tasty rice with meat, vegetables and spices instead, or chicken with rice.

Meat with rice is a very popular dish, made from hundreds of recipes. Different meats, different kinds of rice, different spices. For example, chicken pilaf or pork with rice is a hearty and tasty dish that cooks quickly and easily, a great option for a proper breakfast. No conventions and no rules.

Pork with rice is a basic recipe for home cooking, which you can easily adjust to your own taste. The total cooking time is just over 45 minutes.

Pork with rice, vegetables and spices is almost the perfect breakfast, it will keep you full all day.

7 ingredientsTo the recipe

More with pork and rice

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Classic Cabbage Rolls with Pork and Rice

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Stuffed Peppers in Sour Cream Sauce

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Ingredients

2 servings

Pork 250 g
Basmati rice 1 cup
(180 g)
Onion 1
Garlic 1 head
Carrot 1
Vegetable oil 4-5 tbsp
Ground coriander, ground black pepper, sweet paprika, hot pepper, salt, saffron (marigold petals) Spices:

Step-by-step recipe

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You need boneless pork with as little fat as possible. A piece of shoulder or leg, trimmed of fat, is perfect. Also remove any membranes, small bones and gristle. Cut the pork into small pieces.
Heat the vegetable oil in a frying pan and let it warm up briefly, until it starts to crackle lightly.
Peel the onion and carrot. Cut the onion into thick strips and fry it over high heat until it turns a pleasant golden color. Don’t cover the pan with a lid, and stir the onion fairly often so it fries evenly.
Separate the head of garlic into cloves, without peeling them. Strictly speaking, since there’s a working day ahead, garlic is optional. But the garlic cloves in this dish are very tasty. It’s up to you. Dice the carrot. Add the carrot and garlic cloves to the onion and keep frying everything together for 3-4 minutes.
Add the chopped pork. Keep frying the pork with the vegetables, stirring, until the meat turns pale.
Add all the spices. By the way, pork with rice only gains from more spices than usual. Season with salt and pepper, add 0.5 tsp (level) each of ground coriander and sweet paprika, and a pinch of saffron (or marigold petals). If you like, add ground hot pepper or 1-2 chili pods.
Basmati rice is best for this dish. It is very aromatic and gives the finished dish a wonderfully fluffy, separate texture. Polished rice is usually rinsed before cooking. Perhaps that’s right. But if you bought good-quality rice, it probably no longer contains any rice flour. It’s up to you.
Add the basmati rice to the pork and vegetables. Stir gently and let it heat through for 1-2 minutes. Let the rice grains get coated with a film of oil.
Usually rice is cooked with liquid in a 1:2 ratio, i.e. 2 cups of water (400 ml) per cup of rice. Basmati is a little more delicate than familiar kinds of rice, such as the common parboiled. So you need less liquid. A 2:3 ratio works very well: 1.5 cups of liquid (300 ml) per cup of basmati. Add 300 ml of hot water from the kettle and stir the meat with the rice. Cover the pan with a lid and turn the heat down to the minimum. The dish cooks at the barest simmer, literally just “traces” of boiling.
Rice absorbs liquid quite intensively as it cooks. Even at the gentlest simmer, after 10-12 minutes there will be no free liquid left in the dish. After that time, stir the dish and pile it into a mound in the center of the pan, pushing the rice away from the sides. Cover the pan with a lid and keep cooking over low heat.
From time to time the rice and meat need to be stirred and piled back into a mound. The rice will finish cooking in the steam. The total cooking time from the moment the liquid boils is 25-30 minutes.
The dish cooks a little longer than it takes just to boil the rice until done. The final steaming is very important for the flavor and for perfectly fluffy rice. Over low heat it won’t burn if you stir it from time to time, and with a slightly longer cooking time it only gets better.
Divide the finished rice with meat among plates and serve immediately. If you like, sprinkle with chopped parsley or simply garnish with a sprig; the dish needs no special additions.
One more thing: it turns out that 2-3 small dried chili peppers, added while the rice is cooking, improve the flavor of the dish a lot. Of course, not everyone likes spicy food, but if the peppers are intact, they won’t add much heat. Yet with the chili, pork with rice becomes very aromatic.