I heard your demands: More sandwich reviews, another Sandwich Week, Sandwich Month, Sandwich Decade, actual sandwiches. And I’m known to give the people what they want, especially when that involves me eating sandwiches. I can’t figure out a way to deliver sandwiches directly from the blog to your desktop yet – we don’t have the technology, unfortunately – but until I can, I’m going to provide the Sandwich of the Week writeup on Saturdays. That’ll go a little ways toward taking care of the weekend-post thing, too. And since sandwiches are timeless, I can write them during the week and post them Saturdays, to keep you in suspense and to keep my weekends clear.

Why only once a week? It’s a fair question, given how much we all love sandwiches. But to maximize enjoyment of life on earth, we must achieve some sort of delicate balance between healthy living and utter gluttony. I want to eat lots of interesting sandwiches, but if eat too many now I’ll die young and then won’t be able to eat any more sandwiches.

A friend of mine once said, “I’m going to die someday. And when I die, on my deathbed, I’m sure I’m going to say, ‘I should have had more cake.’” It’s one of my favorite quotes ever. I just figured I’d pass that along.

OK, no more nonsense. Here we go:

The sandwich: Pizza Burger a la Ted, actual TedQuarters.

The construction: Basically everything on the sandwich came from the Grand Central Market in Grand Central Terminal. When you manage a company’s Web site and that company’s Internet fails, you basically get half-a-day. That happened Tuesday, and I wound up in Grand Central with time to kill.

The sandwich – which I conceived while ambling around the market – featured a parmesan-parsley veal burger, fresh mozzarella and fra diavolo sauce from Cerelli’s Market on a toasted Kaiser roll from Zara’s. Oh, and I threw on some fresh basil from the TedQuarters garden.

I cooked the burger on a Weber charcoal grill, which brings me to an important point: If you’re grilling, pay the extra buck or so to buy natural-wood charcoal. I discovered this just last year and it makes a huge difference. Ramps up charcoal-grilled food from awesome to inexplicably awesome.

Important background information: I know, I know. Everything about veal is terrible. Except the veal itself, of course, which is delicious. If they had the parmesan-parsley burgers in sirloin I probably would’ve bought them, both to save cash and because it just seems like overkill to make burgers from veal. And look: I eat veal parmigiana on occasion and it’s amazing every time, but it’s not something I’m necessarily proud of. I’m fully on board with the South Park suggestion of renaming veal “tortured baby cow” so there’s no doubt about where it comes from. I’m not sure that would get me to stop eating it though. So good.

For what it’s worth, I saw something on TV about Japanese Kobe beef. Apparently the Japanese believe that the best meat comes from cows that endure the least stress, so they pamper the things, give them massages every night and even feed them beer. I’m on board with that. I want the cows that are sacrificed for my culinary enjoyment to have the best cow lives possible before they go, just so they maybe get some sense of how much I appreciate their amazing meat.

What it looks like:

How it tastes: Very good. The burger was predictably awesome, since it was made out of veal and had parmesan cheese in it. My only quibble would be that it was a tiny bit too salty.

The Kaiser roll was spectacular. I don’t know that I’ve ever bought anything from a Zara’s before, even though they’re ubiquitous in mass transit locations. But this was good. Fresh, tasty, and strong enough to support the sandwich without being too bready. Perfect selection of bread for the occasion, if I do say so myself.

Fresh mozzarella cheese is fresh mozzarella cheese. You know how I feel about that already; it’s basically my favorite thing in the world. I put it on the burgers just a few seconds before I pulled them off the grill so it was melted just a touch. Even though it was technically a pizza burger, I wasn’t looking to imitate pizza with the stringy, fully melted mozzarella. This worked out – it was clearly incorporated into the burger, but it still cut away evenly with the meat and bread when you bit into it.

The basil added a nice bite to the thing. The only disappointing part of the sandwich, I think, was the sauce. As the product of an Italian mother, it crushes my soul to purchase jarred sauce of any kind, but I can usually bring myself to buy arrabiatta/fra diavolo because mom never really trafficked in spicy sauces and because they’re usually from a decent brand. The Cerelli’s sauce didn’t have much flavor, though – just a touch of sweetness on top of a salty sandwich, no matter how much I added. I was hoping for some heat, and I think a better, spicier sauce might have catapulted this into the ranks of the historically great sandwiches.

What it’s worth: This was not a cheap sandwich, considering I still had to make it myself. All told, the ingredients for each burger probably amounted to about $8, which would be downright reasonable at a restaurant but seems steep at home. The wife claimed it was better than any burger you’d get at a restaurant, but I think she was either being nice or is blinded by my awesomeness. I’d say it was worth the $8 and 20 total minutes of prep time (not continuous, of course, since I had to start the fire a while before cooking and all that).

The rating: 87. A really good sandwich, but not good enough to crack the 90 threshold, which is basically the sandwich Hall of Fame. So though I’m tempted to compare the sandwich to Mike Piazza because it was indeed an Italian Stallion, that’s not really fair to the best-hitting catcher of all time. And the sandwich was way better than Paul Lo Duca, Val Pascucci and F.P. Santangelo. So maybe Mo Vaughn. I’m not sure he was Italian, but he was a real good player nonetheless, and a hearty but imperfect one, much like this sandwich. Plus, Mo Vaughn looks like a man who appreciates a good pizza burger.