A Lovely Spinach Quiche

Although I once cooked dinner every night for my husband for the last seventeen years of his career until he retired and in the years before that I made dinner many nights for my four children, I rarely cook nowadays.  In fact, if I had my way, we would go out to eat every night, except of course since my heart surgery I have been told to lay off the salt which means staying out of restaurants. In my increasing senectitude and indifference to household tasks I fear that out of underlying moral laziness I have ceded too much of the grocery shopping to Richard.  He does not care about "farm fresh," "range free," and I can live with that, but I do cringe when he comes home from his favorite store, Costco, laden with food for a growing family of six.  I know the proportions and measurements; when I was father to four that is how we shopped.  Since he does not regard the sell-by date printed on the side of any container as anything more than the manufacturer's attempt at some spurious respectability, he never feels in any way bound by it.  Throwing out food for whatever reason is akin to bayoneting babies in the imagination of this child of great poverty, who cannot quite grasp that our combined incomes put us very near the top of the economic pyramid where we shall no longer ever know want.  Unless, of course, there is direct hit of a hurricane and we have not stockpiled enough provisions.  There is the irony.  Shop at Costco because it's cheap, never mind that the container of fresh lettuce will supply two weeks of salads.  But don't buy twenty tins of salmon against the day of the hurricane because that's just crazy spending.  Recently a house guest friend of his was my ally in telling him the unrealistic amounts that shopping at a box store produces for two old men.  Grudgingly he admitted that the box of fresh spinach which clogged one entire shelf of our refrigerator was perhaps "a little over the top," and since he and the lady were flying off to  New York later today an inappropriate purchase--something he never would have admitted to me.  That done, I graciously offered to make a spinach quiche, something I remembered doing with elan or eclat or one of those words often enough in days gone by.  We trooped to the local grocery store where items in normal proportions were on the shelf and got whatever else the quiche recipe called for.  Home again, I occupied the kitchen while the old friends sat on his bed dreaming of real estate deals (her profession).  In the next hour I discovered that the simple quiche was in fact like scaling Kilimanjaro.  I was shaking, grumpy, frantic that I would not get those ingredients together on time.  Dicing the onion, the garlic, slicing the red pepper in thin strips, sauteeing these items just so and then adding the damn spinach, finally getting out another fry pan or I would have been there all night.  God, spinach sinks down awfully slowly!  Then the eggs.  Use two whole, and add two yolks.  As I approached the bowl,  and held egg number one in my hand, I couldn't remember which part was the yolk.  Oh, senior moment!  But the hand knoweth what the brain does not and I managed to separate out two yolks, but not without spilling another one down the sink.  I had more or less forgotten the trick of separating eggs.  And last the parmigiano and the grueyre.  The one too old and hard and moldy to grate with any ease, the latter left out on the counter after our shopping too soft to submit a rough edge to the grater.  The custardy cheesy filling was a mess.  I was panting.  Into the oven it went looking like something my kids might have made back in their kindergarten class. All I wanted was a stiff drink.