The moment I realized Mrs. G. was serious, I choked on my own laughter.

For months, whenever she told me I would soon have to cook Sunday dinners, I thought it was a joke. She had cooked all our meals for nearly 30 years. Just because we were going to have an empty nest didn’t seem a good enough reason — well, to me anyway — to usher in such a drastic change.

Her meals were family favorites. On those rare evenings when I cooked, my meals were a success if I didn’t overcook them.

When I met Mrs. G., I measured a meal’s worth very simply: Would there be enough for seconds? I had grown up to be a picky eater, largely unhappy with my mother’s bland menu. Can I get gravy on the rice? That summed me up perfectly.

There was a time, during my senior year of high school, when I saw cooking as a career. But my father, a speech professor at Kapiolani Community College, disapproved.

Right after graduation, though, I got a job as a dishwasher at an Enchanted Lake restaurant, and visions of fine cuisine danced in my head. It was a job with promise: Some of the dishwashers got to cook. They learned to simmer flavors and saute chicken, fish and pork chops. They handed over artfully arranged plates to waitresses who flirted with them.

But not me. I was resigned to scraping food off someone else’s dirty plate.

And so I put my energies into other things, and by the time I graduated from college, I had mastered only three recipes, the highlight of which was called Grunge — canned cream of mushroom soup over ground beef, sprinkled with seasoning salt and served on rice.

When I met Mrs. G. she seduced me with her cooking. People cook to show love, and she won my heart with Dijon mustard chicken, linguine with clam sauce and sun-dried tomatoes, pesto and garlic.

Now, with just the two of us on a Sunday night, it was my turn to woo her.

The first meal I made was a pasta dish with a cream sauce. The sauce curdled and the whole thing tasted tacky. The second dish was meatloaf made from ground bison covered with bacon. It resembled a cinder block in a sea of grease. The Indian curry I made wasn’t too bad, rich with a coconut flavor, but the Gourmet Sloppy Joes the following week reminded me of mud.

Throughout, Mrs. G. ate without complaint. Mostly she said, “Needs salt.”

Then, completely by accident, I made something Mrs. G. had never mastered: brown gravy.

The recipe for the Southern-style pork chops I planned to cook sounded delicious, and I had just learned a nifty way to make better mashed potatoes by boiling some peelings in the milk you plan to use.

But the recipe called for gravy.

Our whole marriage, Mrs. G. said it was impossible to make gravy and blamed her upbringing. Her family could cook a paella over a wood fire in the backyard after cutting the head off a live chicken, but no one could make brown gravy?

So homemade gravy was never on the menu — until now. To me, whisking the ingredients into a simmering brown sauce felt like victory. And love.

As I served the meal, I turned to Mrs. G. and asked, Gravy over everything?

Mrs. G. took a taste and smiled.

Reach Mike Gordon at 529-4803 or email mgordon@staradvertiser.com.