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Can’t wait for the next season of quickfires and eliminations? Fan of former contestants Radhika Desai and Antonia Lofaso?

Then you’re in luck! The Trib’s Stew Blog is reporting that the Top Chef tour truck will be rolling into Chicago this weekend. Bravo says the six shows have closed for pre-registration, but that seats are available on a first come, first served basis. The whole thing will be set up at the corner of Clark Street and Lincoln Avenue, near the Green City Market, and there will be three shows on Saturday (10.30 am, 12 noon, and 1.30 pm) and three shows on Sunday (same times as Saturday).

I’m usually not a rib person. There’s something very primal about ripping meat off bones with one’s teeth, and I’m not really a fan of that.

But I will never, ever turn down a chance to eat at Wagner’s.

It’s a bar, in Porter, Indiana, a good 45 minutes from Michiana by car. You can’t set foot in the building without showing ID to prove that every member of your party is at least 21. Once you’re in the door, though, you notice that the majority of the customers are eating the same thing: ribs.

These ribs are incredibly tender, to the extent that picking one up occasionally results in a messy cascade of meat. You are left holding a bone clean enough to be in a dinosaur fossil display at a museum.

But as any rib aficionado knows, tenderness is the only thing that counts. There’s also the barbecue sauce. Wagner’s sauce is sweet and smoky, with a little spicy kick. I always ask for my ribs “Tim’s style,” which is code for “charred with extra sauce.” The sweet sauce ends up caramelized, adding depth to the whole smoky, sticky rib-eating experience.

Ribs come with two sides at Wagner’s, and the favorites at our table were the waffle fries (standard and good, if a touch under-salted) and cornbread cakes. Some genius in the kitchen decided to cook cornbread on a griddle, like a pancake, and the result is everything you would hope it would be: sweet enough to be a dessert, substantial enough to hold butter, and hot enough to melt it.

We usually do take-out from Wagner’s (with the help of a cooler to keep the food warm on the long ride home), but last night we ate in for the first time. The back room of the bar feels more like a restaurant, with TVs playing muted movies (featuring odd combinations such as knights, Central Park, and lawyers) and walls decorated with beer paraphernalia. If we get a hankering for ribs again before my younger cousins arrive for the summer, we just might drive out there again.
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Wagner’s is located at 361 Wagner Road in Porter, Indiana.

In preparation for my how-to video, which will be posted in the next few days, here’s the recipe for my mother’s meatballs. Done right, they’re tender and savory.

Ingredients:
2 teaspoons olive oil
1 clove garlic
1 onion, chopped
1 2.5 kg jar Ragu Traditional tomato sauce (or your favorite sauce)
3-4 tablespoons Italian (flat leaf) parsley, chopped
2 slices sandwich bread
1/4 cup milk
2 eggs (or 1 per pound of meat)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2-2 pounds ground beef
3/8 cup seasoned breadcrumbs

1. Put olive oil, garlic, and onion in pot. Sauté over medium to low heat until onions are translucent.
2. Add sauce. Rinse jar with a bit of water and pour water into the pot.
3. Add all but a tablespoon of parsley. Reduce heat to low.
4. In a separate bowl, add milk to bread. Mush.
5. Add remaining parsley, eggs, and salt. Stir into uniform glop.
6. Add meat. Stir with a fork until uniformly slimy. Add breadcrumbs, and stir again.
7. Roll into balls about 1.5″ in diameter. Don’t play with the meat too much or the balls will harden.
8. When tomato sauce boils, add balls and smooth them under with the back of a spoon–gently!
9. Cook until done (20-30 minutes).

You know that restaurant in your neighborhood? You’ve been there a few times, the food was fantastic, but for some reason you don’t go as often as you should. In Michiana, that restaurant is the Duneland Beach Inn.

As the name suggests, the restaurant is, in fact, part of a hotel. I have never stayed there, so I can’t comment on the accommodations. If they’re anything like the restaurant, they’re recently remodeled, impeccably maintained and tastefully furnished.

There wasn’t a single element of the meal that was less than wonderful. The staff was great–our waitress, Monica, was attentive without being obtrusive. She knew exactly how many portions of a popular special were left in the kitchen, and ran back with those orders first. She was also very good at selling desserts, but since my dining companions have something of a history of eating cookie sundaes vicariously through me, that may not have been too hard.

I started with a cream of asparagus soup with crab. The soup was delicious–rich but not overwhelming. The balance between the delicate asparagus and the meaty chunks of crabmeat was perfect–neither overpowered the other, but both were distinct. The soup had a thick, soothing texture, with the occasional bite-sized piece of asparagus.

The massive lasagna bolognese was also huge. The familiar sauce had pieces of ground meat that were large enough to be called meatballs. The pasta was nice and thick, and the cheese filling was creamy. All in all, a very strong lasagna. Garlic bread, which accompanies the dish, was fresh from the oven. (Basically, half a baguette, slathered in a garlic oil and a healthy dose of shredded cheese, quickly toasted under a salamander or broiler–hot, crunchy, chewy, fantastic.)

My mother also had me try an accompaniment to her fish–grilled romaine and tomatoes. My guess is that the vegetables had been brushed with olive oil and quickly charred on a grill–the ribs of the lettuce were still crisp. The flavor was smoky, but not overwhelmingly so. The grape tomato that had received similar treatment and was soft and savory.

Then, of course, there’s the dessert my family compelled me to order. Picture this: a slice of a 2.5″ thick Toll House cookie, with a big scoop of vanilla ice cream and whipped cream. The whole thing was then drizzled liberally with caramel and chocolate sauce. If your mental image is good, I won’t need to tell you it was delectable.
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Duneland Beach Inn is located near the lake, between Michiana Shores and Long Beach (technically part of Michigan City, IN).

In my opinion, no Chicago restaurant has taken the place of Hong Min since the tragic fire years ago. For good Chinese food, my family either schleps out to Palos Hills, where the other Hong Min location remains open, or we go to Oriental Pearl in Michigan City, Indiana.

The first thing you’ll notice when you walk into the restaurant is the proprietor. She knows everyone, asks about specific family members, and remembers what her customers like. (She used to work in the kitchen. When her sister left the front-of-house job, the new waitress recognized us by our order and recited the rest of it to us!) Since Memorial Day marks the beginning of the summer for those Chicago residents who spend their weekends here, tonight she was busy hugging those she hadn’t seen since the spring and getting caught up.

Oriental Pearl occupies a corner storefront in downtown Michigan City, with an Asian floral wallpaper border capping the white walls. Chinese music plays in the background. And in the kitchen, they’re doing good work.

We usually start off with a whole slew of appetizers. My mother adores their spareribs, my brothers love the crab rangoon, but I’m partial to the egg rolls and potstickers. Oriental Pearl serves very good renditions of the popular appetizers, and they’re always piping hot. The egg rolls are crispy, neither too large nor too small. The potstickers are juicy within their noodle wrapping. (Please forgive the photo quality–all we had with us was a cell phone.)

As long as I can remember, Oriental Pearl has had outstanding velvet corn soup. The thick soup is full of soft pieces of cooked egg white, plump kernels of corn and little nuggets of ground chicken. Order a large–the leftovers are divine.

By this point in the meal, we’re usually so full of delicious appetizers and soup that we wonder why we order main courses at all. But then the orange chicken arrives and reminds us: the pieces of tender beef have a delicately chewy deep-fried crust. The sauce is savory with just a hint of spice, and to be honest, doesn’t taste much like oranges. I don’t care, though–it’s an excellent flavor of its own. Add a house fried rice (again, an excellent rendition of the classic dish) to round it all out, and you have a wonderful dinner and, most likely, lunch the next day.

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Oriental Pearl is located at 902 Franklin Street in Michigan City, Indiana, near the Lighthouse Place Outlet Mall. Michigan City is about an hour and a half away from downtown Chicago.

Michael Pollan just finished speaking to a crowd so large it required two overflow rooms at the Harold Washington Library.

In a conversation with journalist Bill Kurtis, Pollan talked about how the food industry managed to change conversations about eating less unhealthy foods into eating more healthy foods in the 1970s. Pollan said it’s happening again now. Books like his, which Kurtis said “indicted” the food industry in the same way that Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” did, have led food companies to begin producing foods with fewer ingredients.

Pollan singled out Häagen-Dazs, which recently launched an ice cream with five ingredients. “The implication is that it’s health food,” Pollan said. “It’s still ice cream!”

But Pollan sees hope in the movement, which now includes not only markets and other agricultural ventures but also chefs who are giving farmers the prestige they deserve.

The event was recorded by Chicago Public Radio, and the audio should be available on their Chicago Amplified page at some point in the (near, I hope!) future.

Michael Pollan, author of such foodie manifestos as The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food will be appearing at the Harold Washington Library’s Pritzker Auditorium at 6 p.m. tonight.

Pollan will sign books after the discussion. Admission is free and on a first-come, first-served basis.

Here’s Pollan’s recent appearance on The Colbert Report:

Ponzu Sushi is a friendly little neighborhood joint, right around the corner from my apartment. It used to be Edo Sushi, something of a Lincoln Park institution, but has since been re-invented twice. The first Ponzu was more hip and modern. I used to go there at least once a week for some tekka don. Their presentation was unusual: in addition to the usual tuna sashimi and rice, the dish had a variety of delicious little pickled mushrooms and squash.

Ponzu closed for remodeling, and the tekka don was different when the restaurant opened again. The fish wasn’t as good, the pickled mushrooms were gone. I stopped going.

The other night, though, I had a hankering for udon. There’s something very satisfying about chewy noodles in hot soup on a rainy night. So I called Ponzu, and walked over there a few minutes later. I had to wait a few minutes for my soup, so I knew it was fresh and would stay hot during the three minute walk home.

Nabeyaki udon is a fairly standard dish in Chicago’s Japanese restaurants: thick rice noodles in dark broth, with vegetables, chicken, fishcake, shrimp tempura and, my favorite part, a poached egg.

This version, however, had some kind of sushi nouveau thing going on. The whole dish tasted of red pepper, because there must have been at least a third of a pepper sliced into it. (I don’t know if this is their usual preparation or not–I requested no carrots, because I can’t eat them. It’s possible that this was merely an unfortunate substitution.) I have never encountered peppers in an udon before, and to be honest, I hope I don’t again.

The tempura was good, but the egg had overcooked in the scalding soup. The most disappointing element, though, was the paltry handful of noodles. Udon should have a liberal dose of the slippery, thick noodles, and I found myself digging for them.

Ponzu Sushi is located at 2407 N. Clark Street in Lincoln Park.
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This is the first of what I hope becomes a series of low-key reviews. I welcome comments and suggestions!!

Something strange happened during my year in France. I found myself liking foods I had previously found distasteful. Like eggplant, or the vast array of goat cheese sold at the market (above), or cherries right off the tree. But my heart still sank one night when my host mother brought a beautiful tart to the table. The tart was covered in cooked peppers. Ick.

Turns out, that tart was one of my favorite meals from that year. I’ve since figured out how to make my own version of it, and it’s still one of my favorites.

One of the main differences is the crust. Anne could find ready-made savory crusts in the refrigerator at Monoprix, but I have yet to find them in the US. Instead, I use phyllo dough. (It’s really not that hard to work with–just keep the sheets you’re not using covered in plastic.)

So, without further ado:

Ingredients:
1 package phyllo dough, defrosted (you’ll only need about 12 sheets or so)
5 fresh peppers (red, green, yellow–entirely up to you. I find a nice variety makes for a very pretty tart)
200 grams fresh goat cheese
olive purée or tapenade (Niçoise, if available)
olive oil

1. Roast the peppers. You can either do a traditional roast in the oven or hold them on a gas burner, turning frequently to ensure even roasting. Whichever method you choose, make sure they’re well charred. if you didn’t use the oven to roast the peppers, preheat it to 350º.
2. Immediately after roasting the peppers, put them in a bowl and cover tightly with plastic wrap. The trapped steam will make it much easier to remove the skins. After a few minutes, open the bowl. Peel and slice the roasted peppers.
3. Line a large tart pan with kitchen parchment. Arrange the peppers nicely on the parchment.
4. Crumble the goat cheese over the peppers.
5. Put the olive purée over the goat cheese. (You want a relatively thin layer, or the tart will be very salty.)
6. Place a sheet of phyllo over the whole thing, folding or crumpling the corners so it fits in the pan. Brush lightly or spray with olive oil, then repeat with another sheet of phyllo dough until you’ve built up a dozen or so layers.
7. Bake for 25 minutes or until crust is golden. Invert onto a platter and serve.