Delivered food has to compete with the various grades and levels of home cooking, ranging from scratch cooking down to the consumption of frozen entrees cooked in the microwave. At minimum, the delivery customer has a refrigerator, a microwave oven, and a coffee-maker, and various small kitchen appliances. Fast food in the store, or at the drive-up window, is largely premised on the idea that the customer does not have access to even the most rudimentary cooking equipment. Often the fast food restaurant is really selling the customer a place to sit down. In many cities, if you are willing to eat standing up, you can get much better bargains from vending trucks. I’ve eaten stuffed grape leaves from a Greek vending truck across the street from a McDonald’s, on occasion.

The basic point which underlies the delivered pizza is that you need a special kind of oven to cook pizza, because of the way the bread and fillings are combined. You bake the crust, and then cook the fillings _on_ the crust, using pre-cooked meats, such as various kinds of sausage. To do this, you need a massive oven with a very small, but wide, door opening, which can be kept explosively hot, so that toppings give up their water content as steam, faster than it can soak into the pizza crust.

A hamburger is different. The parts are cooked separately. Twenty dollars or so will get you a toaster-oven to toast your buns when you need them. Similarly, you can make a good hamburger in an electric skillet, or you can have an outdoor grill. It seems that McDonald’s and Wendy’s use a “George Foreman” or “clam” grill in which the meat is clamped between two electrically heated surfaces, and again, a home-sized version can be bought for twenty to fifty dollars. A clam grill delivers heat exactly where it is wanted for browning meat, and therefore has the same order of efficiency as a microwave oven. The quality is not great, but it is more or less acceptable. Burger King flame-broils, after a fashion, but again, not so much that the quality is exemplary. Hardees, a second tier chain, really does flame-broil. Flame-broiling takes time, and the local Hardees has adopted the steakhouse system of taking orders at the counter, but giving the customers plastic flags so that a server can bring their food out to them. What makes Hardees second tier is that it doesn’t spend the money to buy real estate where large numbers of people are going for lunch, the way McDonald’s does.

I’ve eaten frozen microwaveable french fries, which came in a package with its own internal clam grill. There were two layers of a material which was some kind of composite of plastic and metal foil, which acted as microwave antennae, and became quite hot without arcing or igniting. At the same time, it was thin enough that it had no heat capacity to speak of. You had to open the package and push the top down, so that the food was squeezed between the two composite layers, and then zap it in the microwave oven. I found it was better to use a paper plate as a spacer to separate the package from the floor of the oven, and then to tip the fries out on paper towels. I don’t see why the same system could not be applied to hamburgers.

More mundanely, you can keep a supply of fixings in a little refrigerator in your office, and you can make yourself a decent sort of sandwich with cold cuts and sliced cheese on a freshly toasted bun. I’m talking about good cold cuts (eg. Budig) and good cheese, of course, much better grades than what they serve in fast-food restaurants. Also, you can have some potato salad and cole slaw as a side. Chose a variety of potato salad which has lots of diced onions and bell peppers in it. Finish up with bottled fruit juice.

BK at your door elohel next they will be selling home work out with every meal.