Instead of blowing my entertainment budget on craft beers this week, I thought I'd actually, gasp, go out and see a movie. Or two. I'll have 30 minutes between Man of Steel and World War Z to get a bite to eat. There's 2 economy options in the theater's mall area: McDonald's, and Boston Market (which is also a McD's franchise group brand lol). Needless to say, I'm not overjoyed with the choices but if I have to pick one I'll pick Boston Mkt.

Which leads us to the question: what's good at Boston Mkt? And by "good" I mean "high protein index value". The routine is familiar by now: paste the online nutrition info table into a spreadsheet, create a protein-grams-per-calorie calculated column, sort by that and report.

Meals top the list because they're meat sans sides. 4 items exceed .2 protein index. In descending order, these are: quarter skinless rotisserie chx, regular turkey breast, kids' turkey, large turkey breast.

Index values drop 20% or more, to below .16, for the next slew of items. Again, these are all meal foundations: quarter rotisserie chx with skin, 3-piece dark skinless chx (thigh + 2 drumsticks is better than 2 thighs + drumstick), half chicken, Tuscan herb rotisserie chx, and roast beef brisket (regular, kids' meal or large, all within margin-of-error). The roast beef meals are about .1200 index value, which is about equivalent to plain black beans - still very healthy.

After that there's the non-skinless variants of the skinless choices, still very close or exceeding .1 index value.

Deferring side item discussion briefly, next comes salads. Most fast-food chain salads are burdened with very fatty dressings and cheese, and skimp on protein, ending up worse index-wise than the menu mainstay burgers or tacos or whatever. Boston Market manages to build their caesar and mediterranean salads to an index value around .077, still in the abundant-protein-while-losing-weight range for me.

Still up arond the .07 index value area, we have the roasted turkey and rotisserie chicken Market Bowls, followed by the Mediterranean chx and rotisserie chx "Carvers" (sandwiches). Index values start to fall off with the Southwest Santa Fe salad (.066) and pulled BBQ chx sandwich (.064).

With index values around .058, meatloaf meals are the first menu items with reportable levels of trans fats. Under about .054 index value is getting into the "mediocre" protein index range. In the .055 to .050 range we see BBQ ribs, roast beef dip sandwich, roasted turkey sandwich, and meatloaf sandwich.

Under .5 index are pot pies, kids' meal mac+chz, meatloaf Market Bowl, all-white meat chx salad, and ALL sides other than the half-caesar salad variants.

Best of non-salad sides include: squash casserole, garlic-lemon psinach, creamed spinach, mac+chz. "Loaded" mashed potatoes are somehow a better index value (.029) than steamed vegetables (.025) or green beans (.022). The low-protein carb brigade brings up the rear with rice pilaf, mashed potatoes, garlic-dill new potatoes, "fresh vegetable stuffing" ("fresh" in the sense of "cooked", I guess?), cornbread, walnut-cranberry relish, sweet potato casserole, and cinnamon apples.