kitchen intimidation

So I left y'all with the cliffhanger yesterday about how my new (but not even done yet) kitchen is bringing up feelings in me other than excitement.

Want to know what spent most of yesterday feeling as I stood in the kitchen?

I am felt intimidated by it!!

Now that I've slept on it, I realize it is not the kitchen that is making me feel intimidated.  It's the people that are asking me about the kitchen.

Most people know that I'm a foodie at heart and that many many moons ago used to cook professionally (I was a cook/caterer in another lifetime, at the time of the accident).  And so as the kitchen has been coming together, people ask me how it's going, they (naturally, it would seem) ask me things like:

So what's the first thing you are going to cook?
When can I come for dinner?
Whatcha gonna make?
Whatcha gonna do?
Whatcha gonna Whatcha gonna Whatcha gonna....

*sigh*
It's actually sending me into one of those deer in the headlights panic states. It's like I am having performance anxiety or something.  Seriously.


My brain has been soooo wired for stress these past months, that rather than hearing these questions as exciting or inspiring,  I hear them as pressure to perform.  Like I am supposed to pirouette around my kitchen sprinkling pomegranite seeds and zatar everywhere for y'all or something.

Actually, I could do both of those of things with no stove. Bad example. Let me try this again.
Like I am supposed to pirouette around my kitchen and crank out

I talked with KarenTheDancingLurker last night about this after dance class, and when I told her how pressured I was feeling by every one asking me what I was going to cook first, she said:

"Make toast."

I love it. Hilarious!!  But it's true.  I need to just get in there, just me, and prattle about.  Even though I know my way around a kitchen, I do not know my way around this kitchen, and for a long time I will be bouncing back and forth between two houses and two very different kitchens. Things I automatically reach for will be in different places in each kitchen.  And then there is the point of learning learning to use the new appliances. There will indeed be a learning curve with the new appliances.  I will probably burn the first few meals as I am not used to cooking on a range that has a kajillion BTU's and six burners, and every oven circulates heat a little differently, so there will be burnt cookies, too.  I have to figure out why the steam oven has a setting labled "humid"...and where my current dishwasher has On/Off and Scrub/PowerSave, the new dishwasher has something like 8 options...hahahaha.

Writing this post is actually helping.  Just this very moment I had an image flash through my head of me in the kitchen looking sort of looking like I Love Lucy....like with that big giant loaf of bread coming out of the oven.

Hahahahahahaha!!

That's what I needed.  Comic relief!
Ahhhhhhh......

So I will make toast, and play in the kitchen alone for a time or two, and think of Lucy laugh my ass off when it comes out all wrong...

And the next person that asks me "Whatcha Gonna Do", I am going to start signing like this guy (Burton Crane "rapping" on America's Got Talent), because I LOVED HIM :-)