Now that I’m not going to the office every day, I’m making more meals at home. I was walking to the market the other day, thinking about real food, and I remembered spinach frittata.

Everyone liked the old recipe. Hot or cold. Even my egg-disdaining kids. A frittata is a baked omelet, but if you put enough flavorful items in it, it isn’t eggy at all.

The frittata recipe uses sauteed spinach and diced onion, wheat germ, lots of Parmesan cheese. As well as 6 eggs, basil, oregano, salt, pepper. It gets a final Parm dusting and a run under the broiler, so it has a crispy cheesy top.

Yes, I thought, as I walked up the hill to the store. I have excellent Parmesan already, left over from that pizza I made when the kids visited. I was going to buy half a dozen eggs to hard boil, but I’ll make it a dozen. What else do I need? There’s wheat germ in the fridge. Old wheat germ. I’ll buy an organic yellow onion. And spinach.

The recipe works best with defrosted frozen spinach. Of course fresh can be used, but it takes a lot of fresh to generate the cooked-down mass needed. And I didn’t feel like cleaning and chopping.

I had a plan. Then I thought about the baking dish. The recipe calls for an 8″ by 8″ square (in the old days we sometimes doubled the ingredients and used a rectangular lasagne pan). I mentally ran through a cabinet inventory and couldn’t envision the Pyrex dish.

Of course. That makes sense. Ten years ago I busted up the old house and moved into two tiny cottages. I took all my bakeware to the Eugene place, a 500 square foot studio in the back yard of the property that housed my daughter, son-in-law, and three grandsons. I figured I’d do all my baking there.

But after seven years the offspring moved to Portland. I found tenants for the Eugene place. I gave all the muffin and baking pans to my daughter.

Okay … But I was not deterred. I thought about pots, but mine had wooden handles; they couldn’t go in the oven. I considered the stainless steel bowl, but it’s too big. I’m my daughter’s mother; I can DIY with the best of them. (That’s not precisely true – I’m good with the ideas but I’m lax with the minutiae. The fabrication details are more my daughter’s thing, and her father’s. There’s a reason I chose writing for my creative outlet: no special tools or space required.) But I knew I had aluminum foil. I figured I could fashion a baking dish.

When I entered the small grocery store I wondered if they had those disposable roasting pans. The market is tiny. It has a lot of hard-to-find items, like the best peanuts in existence and unsweetened coconut chips, but the housewares section is minute. But I sought. I found what looked like a disposable turkey pan on top of the end of an aisle. I fumbled in it and pulled out the next largest item: a loaf pan for 79¢. What the heck: I figured I’d make poundcake-shaped frittata.

I picked up a lovely small onion. Then I headed for the frozen veggies.

I couldn’t believe it. NO frozen spinach. I looked at the fresh leaves. Uh uh. Almost $5 a pound and too much work. I went back to the freezer. I spotted a bag of chopped frozen kale. I saw no reason kale wouldn’t work. So I bought that.

Home with my goods, I poured two-thirds of the kale into a strainer to defrost. I took the olive oil out of the fridge to liquify. An hour later I was ready to cook. The kale and onion made a lovely saute in the olive oil. I cracked 6 eggs into a bowl and fired up the old portable GE mixer I’ve had since 1972. I added oregano and basil and salt and pepper and most of the cheese and then I went for the wheat germ.

That was the third strike (charm?). I pulled the big bottle of Kretschmer’s out of the refrigerator and looked at the printing on its side. BEST BEFORE NOV 24 06.

Huh? I moved into my place in July 2007. I did the math. I put wheat germ that was 8 months beyond its pull date into my refrigerator back then? And I was now about to use stuff a decade past its use-by date?

Sure I was. My mother wouldn’t, but I’d learned not to heed her kitchen advice. Mom had stove fires so regularly that when I first set up a kitchen I stocked it with fire dousers. It was months before I noticed that I never had a fire. Or sliced my hand on a kitchen knife. Or burned baked goods. Since then I have freely experimented with extension of the limits my mother believed in. So I wasn’t intimidated by a date on a glass jar.

The bottle had never been opened. The stuff had been continuously refrigerated. I was laughing out loud while I hit the lid with the side of a knife a few times. Then I twisted with all my might, and heard the satisfying pop that told me the contents had been air-tight. Without hesitation I filled the quarter-cup measure and dumped the wheat germ into the batter.

I baked the frittata for 25 minutes instead of the suggested 15. I waited till I could see golden edges. Then I sprinkled what was left of the Parmesan on top and put the pan under the broiler.

It was good. It was delicious. There was a tiny part, dead center, that was a little wet but otherwise the frittata was perfect. No problem with the wheat germ. No issues with the kale.

It took me three days to finish it, and immediately I wanted more. Today I picked up another onion. A new wedge of Parmesan. I even found frozen spinach. And I’ve just returned from a jaunt with my BFF, which involved food and shopping, and which included the acquisition of a perfectly square metal 8″ by 8″ pan.

(By the way, the dish takes half a cup of Parmesan plus some for the top. I ran the numbers while assembling, and the frittata packs about 1200 calories, consisting of about 79 g of fat, 34 g of carb, and 88 g of protein.)