Cheryl Wixson considered the drops of olive oil and bits of onion peel and parsley littering her kitchen floor.

“Leave it,” she directed her cooking students, moving on. “This is a cook’s kitchen.”

Last fall, when she remodeled the kitchen of her circa-1929 bungalow on West Broadway in Bangor, the gourmet chef and former restaurateur knew she could never be comfortable in a showplace of a room where spills would be catastrophic.

“I wanted a kitchen without airs and pretenses, a kitchen to use and enjoy,” Wixson confided recently. “I wanted it to look like it’s lived in, like it belongs to people. It will wear, it will get stained, there might be a dent in the floor where you’ve dropped a frying pan — but it’s all part of the room’s beauty, part of the pleasant memories associated with it as it ages.”

Anyway, worrying about every spot robs a cook’s creativity, according to Wixson, who recently opened a cooking school called Cheryl Wixson’s Kitchen. “When you’re on a roll and having a good time, putting your heart and soul into your cooking, you can’t stop to scrub the floor,” she said.

Last week, as she bustled about, pouring coffee into thick, white mugs, Wixson recalled the way things used to be. The kitchen originally had been three small rooms which consisted of a maid’s kitchen, bedroom and toilet, while the attached conservatory — where Wixson keeps her herbs and winters-over her plants — replaced an entryway and porch.

Wixson noted the kitchen features she loves: stainless-steel, state-of-the-art appliances; gray soapstone counters which develop a lovely patina with every mark and ring; and a brick Russian-style fireplace and bake oven surrounded by a heated soapstone bench.

Several years ago, after Wixson closed her downtown restaurants, Gourmet to Go and Cafe Nouveau, so she could spend more time with her family, she realized she could no longer make do with the tiny kitchen she had used for nearly 20 years.

“I had been feeding people left and right, and I couldn’t imagine not cooking,” said Wixson, 43, former executive director of Bangor’s Tarratine Club. “But my style is a very social thing that involves everybody. When I cook, everyone hangs out with me and either watches me or participates in some way, maybe chopping vegetables or helping to making bread. The old kitchen was efficient — I could work very nicely there — but I couldn’t involve 20 people.”

Designing the renovation project became a three-year family affair, according to Wixson, who said, “Everyone had something they wanted.”

While Wixson’s goal was a restaurant-type, family kitchen with a sensible traffic flow and efficient work stations, her three daughters loved the idea of the huge, 4-foot-wide refrigerator, and her husband, Phillip McFarland, felt strongly about keeping the character of the old house.

After commissioning architect J. Gordon of Bangor to put the plans on paper, Wixson hired House Revivers, also of Bangor, as the builder. Then she put on her work boots and labored right along with the crew.

“It was a blast,” recalled Wixson, a trim, energetic woman who has written numerous food columns for the Bangor Daily News.

Making the kitchen look like it had always been there was a painstaking process. The builders tore out and then reinstalled the original white cast-iron sink, molding, cabinets and shelves in the kitchen. “Every step of the way, we’d look at the details in the existing house and copy them, try to get inside the heads of the people who built the house,” Wixson said.

Their work has paid off. Today, the corners of the molding and the planks of the wood flooring fit just as they do in the older part of the house, said Wixson, pointing out that the new construction was made even more authentic by replicating the glass door between the conservatory and kitchen to match the one between the dining and living rooms.

Workers added to the quaintness of the kitchen by using a recycled maple floor from a Lincoln dance hall and ceiling lights salvaged from a Guilford school, said Wixson.

While the rest of her home boasts rich-colored walls in blue, pink and red, Wixson opted for an off-white kitchen. “It’s like a blank palette,” she said, with the food and its presentation providing the color.

The family uses the conservatory as a gathering place and a mudroom to hang ice skates and school bags. Placed in one corner, a terra-cotta fountain counteracts the dry wood heat and provides humidity for plants and people, while a bench and a table and chairs set in the middle of the bright, airy room make it the perfect place to congregate.

While the conservatory is glassed in on three sides, Wixson chose off-white wainscotting for the remaining wall and ceiling to carry out the original wainscotting in the attached garage. And she had radiant heat installed underneath the floor.

“It’s so much more comfortable,” she said. “When your feet are warm, the rest of you will be warm.’

Although the house was “like a war zone” during the three-month construction period, Wixson said she was able to prepare hot meals by carefully planning beforehand how she’d stock supplies, where the family would eat, and how to schedule the various workers.

Using the pantry as a temporary kitchen, Wixson set up a two-burner propane stove, a microwave and toaster oven, and proceeded to treat her family and the workers to homemade chili, pea soup and fish chowder, chocolate chip and peanut butter cookies, muffins and coffeecakes.

Carpenter Alan Wancus happily talked last week about the “really good” meals Wixson served up to the crew seated around the dining room table. “We usually don’t get treatment like that,” he said, recalling pork, shrimp and chicken dishes, crabmeat casseroles and pizza baked in the brick oven.

Wixson even made lobster salad sandwiches to celebrate one of the painters’ birthdays. “My mouth is watering just thinking of it,” said Wancus. “It was one of the best lunches I can remember.”

Wixson said her success at keeping a semblance of normalcy during the construction chaos is testimony to the logistical and organizational skills she honed as a student at the University of Maine.

“I knew I could figure out how to make things work and how to get from point A to point B — I just wasn’t sure exactly how I’d do it,” said Wixson, the first woman to graduate from the agricultural engineering program in 1976, and the first woman engineer to be hired at Scott Paper in Winslow that same year.

Wixson is no stranger to preparing meals in cramped quarters and improvising when circumstances demand it. She has spent summer vacations cooking in the galley of sailboat, and she once cooked an eight-course meal for 45 people in the tiniest of kitchens.

Wixson, the oldest of four children, grew up on dairy farms in Norway and Winslow with a mother and grandmother who also loved to cook and eat wholesome, well-cooked meals.

“I started with meatloaf, mashed potatoes, roast chicken and beans,” said Wixson, who recalled traveling to Europe years ago and “being blown away” by the artfully prepared continental cuisine.

Wixson decided then to expand her repertoire. “I began trying new things and buying new ingredients,” said the chef who is constantly researching different dishes and cultures.

“If you cook a particular cuisine, you need to understand the country and its people — that’s what a good cook does,” said Wixson, who is writing a cookbook focusing on healthy, low-fat recipes.

Wixson wanted to cook with wood to “understand the cuisine of our great-grandmothers.” So she opted for a wood oven built by Maine Wood Heat in Norridgewock. She said it burns quickly and efficiently, and keeps the kitchen deliciously toasty.

Years ago, women tailored their cooking to the different temperatures of the oven. Biscuits were made early in the day when the oven was at its hottest, while bread-baking was reserved for a moderately hot oven. After the oven cooled off, it would be time to prepare stews and pot roasts.

Wixson, who uses the wood oven for baked beans and pies, once made six wood-roasted lobsters over the open flame. “The texture is totally different than boiled lobster,” she recalled. “It’s very soft, it melts in your mouth.”

Wixson chose a gas cook top because its precise, instantaneous heat works best for sauteeing vegetables and making sauces. But she likes the more even heat of her double electric convection ovens for cakes, breads and cookies.

The industrial-sized, 30-quart Hobart mixer that stands nearby was “my treat,” said Wixson, who figured that if she had the oven capacity to make 20 loaves of bread she needed a mixer that could accommodate the large quantity of dough.

The days of managing restaurants are behind her, but Wixson still feeds people. She recently baked a banana cake for the plumber who installed her dishwasher, and plans on offering her daughter’s allergist a batch of spicy Mexican vegetable soup.

She is notorious for dropping off food packages. “My family doesn’t like leftovers,” said Wixson. “And this is my gift to people. I get tremendous enjoyment out of it, much more than they get eating it, I’m sure.”

Wixson was in her glory one evening several weeks ago as she relaxed in the conservatory with some of her cooking students. Sitting companionably around the table, enjoying freshly made bowls of homemade soup by candlelight, they listened to the soothing sound of the fountain and watched the moonlight make glittering patterns on the snow.

For Wixson, it doesn’t get any better. “Breaking bread with people, practicing the fine art of gracious dining, sitting down to a well-set table, and enjoying the fruits of our labor — it’s what I love,” she said. “It’s truly nourishment for the soul.”

For more information on Cheryl Wixson’s cooking classes, call 947-0892.