As promised, Y&H put Steven Raichlen's tenderloin cheesesteak recipe to the test over the Labor Day weekend. By and large, I'd say it's a winning, low-carb and high-cholesterol approach to the classic Philly cheesesteak; the four of us gobbled the dish down with little complaint.

But with all due respect to Raichlen, I do have some suggestions:

• Skip the cutesy onion lollipop trick, particularly if the interior of your allium is segmented. The damn thing will fall apart on the grill (unless you manage to skewer through the segments to hold them together). Frankly, tongs are just as easy.
• Add more roasted peppers, provolone, and grilled onions to the interior of the tenderloin. I thought the meat-to-filling ratio leaned too heavy on beef.
• Depending on the heat of your grill and the size of your tenderloin, you'll likely need to cook this sucker longer than Raichlen recommends. I grilled the whole loin over direct wood-fired heat (a combination of oak, hickory and charcoal), and it still took about 20-25 minutes. Even with the extra heat, the loin was barely cooked at the center. I have to say, though, it went down like fine wine.
• And whatever you do, don't buy your tenderloin at Whole Foods. I had already committed to preparing this dish for a small gathering, so I was stuck paying Whole Paycheck's exorbitant rate (about $26 a pound) for the whole tenderloin. If I'm going to spend that kind of cash on beef, I'll go to Wagshal's, thank you very much.
• The leftovers make for excellent steak sandwiches the following day, maybe the best I've ever had.

I'm so making this over the Labor Day weekend.

Notice what kind of grill Raichlen is using? The Argentine-style one sold by D.C.'s own Ben Eisendrath.

My friend Jim Shahin had called me a few weeks ago about his latest find: a firewood lot in Bladensburg that sells seasoned oak and hickory and walnut and other woods. This news hit me hard, like humidity in August. We had been looking for a reliable source for seasoned hardwoods for, like, forever. The Firewood Factory of D.C. (4521-A Kenilworth Ave. 202-554-4100) seemed like an answered prayer or something.

The best news, Jim told me, was the lot's resident wood man, Tony Meeks, son of owner Bennie Meeks. Tony's like the wood whisperer. He understands wood like few others. Check out the video and see why.

Tony's so good, I walked away with a 100 pounds of hardwood. The only bad news here is that Tony Meeks is throwing it all away to go back on the road. He's a once and former over-the-road trucker.

Jim, by the way, has his own advice on summer barbecue, too.

This may be Y&H's favorite time of the year, when friends and neighbors and even the local grocery store pull out their charcoal grills (or smokers, if you're into that whole messy, drawn-out process) and start cooking up burgers and brats and Portabellas and anything else that benefits from a little smoke and char. Personally, I can detect a working grill at a thousand paces.

Which is why I wheeled into the Whole Foods on P Street when I saw this gent grilling up some burgers, kebabs, and dogs. The grill was a tractor beam, inexorably pulling my vehicle over to the curb like some Meat Death Star.

The friendly dude working the grates says, now that the weather's nice, Whole Foods will be trotting out the grill for lunch and dinner on weekdays and all day long on weekends. The typical offerings will include burgers (cheese extra), hot dogs, chicken kebabs, and, because Whole Foods knows its audience, the occasional Tofurky dog. Prices range from about $3 to $5.

Given the quality of meats and condiments found inside the store, I'd think our street food scene just improved by a factor of two.

A couple more pictures after the jump.

Whole Foods may offer the only grilled food available on D.C.'s streets.

The burgers will taste even better when tomato season hits.

Started in the late 1970s by Charles Eisendrath, the Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Grillworks company was essentially an exercise in "recreational capitalism" for its founder, who was far more interested in his work in the journalism field. The former Time magazine foreign correspondent made it virtually impossible for potential customers to buy his Argentine-style grill.

It wasn't until 2007, when son Ben Eisendrath took a buyout from AOL, that Grillworks was finally treated as a proper, full-service enterprise. You can read the Grillworks' story here.

So how did father feel about son taking over his oft-neglected company? I asked Charles Eisendrath that question in an e-mail while he was visiting Moscow last month. His response:

I never dreamed that this would or could happen, which is one of the reasons I was so thrilled when it did.

A living legacy is the best kind, and we're having fun merging mine with his in a couple of new product ideas, one of them an in-fireplace model, the other a clockwork rotisserie mechanism still in development.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Fall officially begins tomorrow, which means it's time for apples and squashes and pears and figs and pomegranates. As my last gasping attempt to hold onto summer, I uncovered the smoker on Saturday afternoon and grilled up these buffalo patties that I bought from the FreshFarm Market by the White House on Thursday. They're very lean, only about 5 percent fat, which meant they weren't as tasty as your average 80-20 blend. But they were flavorful enough after I put grilled tomatoes and red onions on them, particularly those patties that I managed to cook to temperature and not leave over the hot spot of the grill. How long does it take to learn the nuances of your damn smoker/grill?

More pictures of juicy meat after the jump.

The funny thing is, Judge didn't even intend for the finale to be the finale.