**So, did you make the Coke Roast?**

Yes.

**How did it come out?**

Kind of dry.

**Did you overcook it or something?**

Yes.

**How is that possible, since you threatened to poke it with a Thermapen every six minutes?**

I got cocky.

**Was it good anyway?**

The crusty exterior part was awesome.

**Did it taste like Coke, despite the fact that Cook’s Illustrated promised it wouldn’t?**

Totally. But in a good way.

**Did you keep going back to the kitchen and pulling off crunchy bits?**

Yes.

**Will this experience turn you into a fool who can’t stop roasting?**

Only if I can figure out how to make a roast that is 100 percent crust.

There’s no real trick to homemade pizza. Turn the oven up all the way and hope for the best. But I can offer a few tips.

1. If you’re making homemade dough, the recipe makes less difference than how long you let it ferment. Stick it in the fridge overnight and you’ll have better dough. But there’s no shame in buying dough at a pizzeria or Trader Joe’s.

2. Use low-moisture whole milk mozzarella, and mix it with a little grated Parmigiano-Reggiano for flavor.

3. Iris loves putting pepperoni on the pizza, but she has trouble biting a whole slice. So I cut the pepperoni slices into four wedges, and she has just as much fun putting them on but more fun eating the pizza.

4. Most vegetable ingredients (mushrooms, peppers, onions) benefit from precooking. Otherwise not only will they end up undercooked, but they’ll leak water onto your pizza.

5. Hunts Traditional canned tomato sauce makes great pizza sauce, and it’s really cheap.

6. When you go out for pizza with kids, bring scissors.

7. One of the best reasons to make pizza at home is to mess around with toppings that you can’t get elsewhere. We love bacon with pickled jalapeños. Ask your kids what they’d like to try on pizza.

8. Yes, you do need a pizza stone, but you can leave it on the bottom oven rack and forget about it. It will improve the performance of your oven even when you’re not making pizza.

9. Roll the dough thin enough that the pizza is done in six to seven minutes. More than this and the crust will start to try out, and Iris will get impatient.

9. Insufficient pizza consumption is associated with irritability and slack-jawedness. Don’t let this happen to you.

Since my big bowl epiphany the other day, I’ve been shopping around. I struck out at City Kitchens and Pottery Barn. I did find what I was looking for at Williams-Sonoma. For $39 per bowl. Not quite the price range I was envisioning.

This item at Target is close to what I’m after. However, they’re out of stock (although they have it in various cutesy colors like Banana Sunset), and ideally I want something a little deeper and more spherical. The carp bowl I have is 8 inches by 4 inches, which means it holds about eight cups. (I knocked off some volume because the foot takes up some space.) I definitely want white. Slightly off-white would be acceptable. Banana Sunset would be awesome. Not!!!

I haven’t been to IKEA yet, nor am I likely to make a special trip there just for bowls unless someone tells me they have what I’m looking for. Also, the bowls I’ve bought at IKEA in the past have chipped like crazy. Anyone have tips for where else to look? I will not rest until I have big bowls aplenty. Unless you count naps.

Were anyone to break into my house right now and raid the refrigerator, he would come across something on the bottom shelf that might send him fleeing. It’s a four-pound pork roast soaking in a brine consisting of two liters of Coca-Cola, a large handful of kosher salt, and a head of garlic.

This saga (which may still end in tears) began a couple weeks ago when I was meat shopping at the farmers market. I stopped at the Samish Bay Cheese stand. Cheesemaking begins with separating the curds from the whey and ends with a wheel of cheese and a bunch of excess whey. One of the best ways to dispose of the whey is to feed it to pigs, which is why Samish Bay Cheese sells pork as well as cheese. (One of the best ways to dispose of cheese is to feed it to me.)

I buy Samish Bay’s ground pork regularly, and it’s excellent, so I wanted to try some of their other products. I’m most comfortable working with pork shoulder, which I braise in so many ways. Naturally, they didn’t have any with them. So I walked away with a pork leg roast, also known as fresh ham, and a head full of questions.

It’s not just that I’ve never roasted a fresh ham before. It’s that I’ve never roasted much of anything. “We can learn to be cooks, but we must be born knowing how to roast,” said Brillat-Savarin. Even though this is obviously false, it doesn’t inspire confidence. Although I am feeling better imagining the person who *was* born knowing how to roast, sitting in her bouncy seat and reaching up ever so often to turn the whole pig on a spit, then offering a tiny thumbs-up.

So I wanted to minimize my chances of ruining this lovely, well-marbled piece of meat. Some Googling turned up this blog post, which led me back to the March/April 2001 issue of Cook’s Illustrated and the Coke Pork recipe. Apparently the acidity and sweetness of the Coke produces a spectacularly tender and juicy end result. Plus, after you take the pork out of the brine, you can drink it.

All I have to do now is not overcook it. I’ll be hanging around the oven door with a sharpened Thermapen, stabbing regularly.

The other day Iris and I had some leftover noodles for lunch. This was something I cooked up in a last-minute “what’s for dinner?” panic that turned out pretty well: Chinese wheat noodles with a sauce of ground pork, hot bean paste, hoisin sauce, and baby bok choy from the farmers market.

We had plenty of leftovers, so I plunked a big portion of noodles into a bowl and popped it in the microwave. When it came out, I realized the bowl was too full to stir. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll just dump these noodles into a bigger bowl, and when I’m done heating them, I’ll put them back into the smaller bowl.” So I dumped the noodles into the large bowl with a carp printed on it, the one Iris calls the Fishbowl.

Of course, by the time the noodles were hot, I realized that there was no reason to transfer them back, so I just ate them out of the big bowl. And I think I enjoyed them a lot more than I would have from the small bowl. Iris had her usual small bowl and plate, but she did request some bites out of my bowl.

I’m not among the first billion people to figure this out, of course. Ramen and pho are served in large bowls, and there’s a restaurant chain called [Big Bowl](http://www.bigbowl.com/) which has spawned an excellent cookbook.

Now that I’ve made this stunningly obvious leap, I want big bowls for the whole family, big white ones that could work equally well for Italian and Asian noodles. The way this is going, we may need a bigger table.