ANDY ROONEY

©2004 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Cooking’s The Thing When Vacation Comes Around

When I am at work, I write. When I am on vacation, I cook. I hope I write better than I cook, but I’ve done a lot of both. (It bothers me, in observing myself, to note that I eat more than I read.) Over the years, I have learned more about cooking from eating in good restaurants than I have learned from cookbooks. Every city has a couple of good restaurants, and New York has hundreds. It is now the best restaurant city in the world.

Paris has some of the best, but the best in Paris are all French. New York has a great diversity. One of the interesting things that have happened in this country is the growing number of Japanese restaurants and the diminishing number of Chinese restaurants. Monosodium glutamate was the be-ginning of the Chinese decline.

Yesterday I bought one of those little pork tenderloins. They’re deceptive because they’re solid meat with no waste, so they’re bigger than they look. Mine was a pound and a third, more than enough for four people. I cut it into cubes and stir fried it briefly and made a semi-Chinese dish with rice, onions, mushrooms and teriyaki sauce.

I use rice more than potatoes, and pasta about as often as potatoes. I buy basmati rice in 20-pound bags because it’s so good and, while it costs more, the price of rice doesn’t have much influence on what dinner costs. I don’t follow the instructions anyone gives for cooking rice because they all tell you to use too much water. If you’re cooking one cup of rice, a cup and a quarter of water is enough. Add maybe half a teaspoon of salt. I like to cook rice in a broad-bottomed frying pan with a tight cover.

Bring the water with the rice to a boil, then turn down the heat and leave it for six or seven minutes. Turn it off and forget it. Don’t remove the cover to look at it! Leave it for 15 minutes and, anytime you’re ready, take off the cover and shuffle it off the bottom with a spatula. I add a little butter. (I add a little butter to almost everything.)

When I cook potatoes, I either bake them until the skins are hard or cut them into half-inch cubes and put them in the oven on a sprayed cookie sheet at about 400 degrees until they’re brown. You have to shake them up once in a while. In a separate pan, I cook a chopped-up onion in butter and mix it with the browned potatoes. If I bake the potatoes, I cut them in half lengthwise when they’re done. Then I scoop the potato into a bowl, mix it with butter and sour cream, salt and pepper and put it back in just half the skin so it’s heaped up. A little paprika on top doesn’t taste like much but it looks as though the cook cared.

Blue cheese is good in either a salad or baked potatoes. Blue cheese is Ame-rican and pretty good. Stilton cheese is from England and is better. Gorgonzola, from Italy, is excellent, and French Roquefort is much the best, but we got into a fight with the French about something and put such a high tariff on Roquefort that you can’t afford to buy it.

Lettuce is better than it used to be, but tomatoes are worse. Like melons, you hardly ever get a ripe one. For years, I used nothing but romaine but now there are a lot of different kinds of greens that are good. I used to use mayonnaise in my dressing but now I just use olive oil and vinegar. Expen-sive olive oil is like a good bottle of wine but cheaper and worth it. Fancy vinegar is a waste of money. Some-times I chop up a small red onion and put that in.

Last night, two grandchildren were here for dinner and I made ice cream from a quart of cherries Cecile bought.

The kids pitted the cherries with a new gadget that does that. They also shucked the corn and did a good job getting all the silk off the corncobs. Cherries have a great taste but it isn’t very dominant and tends to get lost in the milk, cream and sugar. So I added a half a can of frozen concentrated lemonade that I had in the freezer. The ice cream still tasted more like cherry than lemon.

My ice cream maker has a self-contained freezing unit and it’s OK, not great. Someone ought to come up with an ice cream-freezer for the home be-cause making ice cream amazes your friends. It’s so easy — just milk, cream, sugar and flavoring. Vanilla is the easiest, but grinding up some peaches isn’t hard. Chocolate ice cream is the hardest to make at home. To make coffee ice cream, I put six or seven tablespoons of espresso in a cup of boiling water, let it sit and then put it through a paper filter and into the cream mix-ture.

Today, I’m making bread. Making bread is one of the most satisfying little jobs anyone can do — better even than washing your car in the driveway. Rising bread could make an atheist believe in God. It’s like magic. My bread has been a disappointment over the years, though, and I’ve decided I‘ve been trying to do it too quickly. So I’m letting this batch rise four or five times. What I’m after is sourdough. I hit the dough mixture in the bowl with no stick spray before covering it with plastic so the top doesn’t dry out.

Maybe you’d like to come over for dinner some night. I’ll write something for you and then order in.