Would you believe that my wife and I completely forgot that today was Easter Sunday?

We were watching The Amazing Race when Mrs E suggested we get a pizza from Papa Murphy’s, the neighborhood take-and-bake chain. It sounded pretty good to me–the prices are good, the ingredients are fresh, and they prepare the thing right there in front of you like a Subway. Except with pizza instead of sandwiches. Anyway, she goes out to score the pizza, and 20 minutes after she left, I get a text message from her saying it’s Easter Sunday and Papa Murphy’s is closed.

Uh-oh. So’s the grocery store. And just about every other place that appealed. Our cupboards are empty because we were too busy to go grocery shopping earlier in the weekend. We’re both starving by this point in time, and we made the semi-desperate decision to hit the local Denny’s for supper, since they were one of the few places that were open.

It was a surprising experience. Now, this is Denny’s, and my expectations for restaurants like that are pretty low. I’m talking “Please, Lord, I hope we don’t get food poisoning” low. I ordered their double cheeseburger because I didn’t believe their menu photo for one minute–I thought it would be a sad little biscuit-sized travesty with 2 vaguely beefy-tasting slices of processed meat product, placed forlornly in a depressing nest of limp, flaccid, and soggy fries. Instead, I actually got a I-shit-thee-not massive double cheeseburger that looked like it needed to be renamed Humongorr the Burgernormous. I had to sort of nibble at it rather than being able to bite into it, even after mashing it down to something that wouldn’t require me to dislocate my jaw to eat.

It wasn’t bad. About a six on a scale of 1-10, with 1 being “microwave burger from vending machine” and 10 being Mighty Fine Burgers. Next time, I get the regular sized burger, because damn. Fries were surprisingly OK as well.

Mrs E picked out the Tsing Tsing Chicken as the appetizer, and she had some sort of BLT sandwich with a really unfortunate name that made me think of whoopee cushions. The Tsing Tsing Chicken is, as the name implies, supposed to be some sort of Chinese-style sweet-and-spicy chicken. I wasn’t expecting much from it either, but I was pleasantly surprised. It actually tasted way better than the typical “meaty lumps in red sauce”, “meaty lumps in brown sauce”, or “meaty lumps in slightly redder sauce with sesame seeds” kind of stuff you get at the local Chinese buffets. I was stunned when the waitress asked us if we wanted ranch dressing with it. Ranch dressing? With Chinese-ish kreplach? The horror.

We were planning to try the bacon maple sundae (they’re running this Baconalia thing for 10 weeks where they add 7 bacon-themed dishes to the menu), but we were much too stuffed to even entertain the thought. Yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like: vanilla ice cream, maple syrup, topped with crumbled bacon. We’re gonna try that next time.

I’m about three minutes from a meat coma, so I’m gonna pack it in for the night.