As Caroline put it today, “For someone with…an insatiable nutty curiosity, your blog has been awfully quiet lately.” Updates on more serious topics are coming, but I’d like to start with a bleg: does anyone have any suggestions for dealing with severe, multi-day muscle pain?

Also, Ezra Klein’s revelation that even Potbelly’s vegetarian sandwich has 550 calories and 60% of your day’s saturated fat (thanks to the three kinds of cheese they put on it) was quickly followed by his Cheesecake Factory roundup. Takeaways:

• Michael Ruhlman thinks the Cheesecake Factory does, in fact, rock.
• You should never, ever, ever order mashed potatoes there (bottom of this image from Calorie Lab).
• The CF’s miso-glazed salmon weighs in at 1,673 calories, 500 more than their chicken piccata and across-the-board worse for you than their shrimp scampi, though it doesn’t come close to the 2134-calorie, 81-grams-of-saturated-fat monstrosity that is the pasta carbonara. As Ezra notes, both miso and salmon are pretty low-fat, so I’m curious as to where all that gut-busting comes from.
  

This is a pretty compelling reason to require nutrition information on restaurant menus (and though I’m no great fan of Cosi, they’re one of the few chains that does so).

Update: Caroline just linked me to this fascinating look at fast-food hamburgers (PDF). Just so you know, the average fast-food burger is 12.1% meat. I’ll let you find out what the other 87.9% is on your own.

More potentially-related posts:

1. Lost in the supermarket.
2. The “everyday food” list.
3. Linkwad.