 "Photo: The Olympian")
 "Photo: The Olympian")
There is only one class left before Olympic College student and catering coordinator for the Culinary Arts department Christina Nys completes the culinary arts program and receives her associate degree. Nys is not letting this hold her back from turning her ideal job into a reality.
After spending two years at Trophy Lake Golf and Casting Club where she was in charge of both the restaurant and catering, she decided to take her final class at OC and devote all of her time to catering.
She now runs the catering for the OC Bremerton campus, which, according to Chef Instructor Steve Lammers, entails catering for small events, parties and weddings for up to 300 people.
Nys said she did not always know that she wanted to cater for a living. She had spent 20 years as a stay-at-home mom, while catering out of her home. She said the time had come to choose a profession and knew she didn’t want to go into office work. That was about the time her catering business began taking off and “I thought, what the heck. Why don’t I do that?”
“It’s not a love,” said Nys. “I grew up in a very large family, so cooking for 15 when I was little was always the norm. Then people get married and cooking for 30 is no problem. Then you realize that you can bust out cooking for 50 with no problem. By the time I was 22, I could cook for 50 people with no problem.”
Growing up, she cooked dinners for their household of 15, along with her mom, grandmother and aunt. Nys said she got a lot of her experience in the 12 years prior to OC, when her dad asked her to start cooking dinners once a month for 100 people in the Guatemalan community at their church.
“I feel like, if you know how to cook, you know how to cook,” said Nys, “but being able to cook commercially is where you run into trouble with people who want to cook for a living.”
Approximately four years ago, at the age of 48, Nys began the culinary program at OC to develop the skills necessary to cook commercially.
She said Chef Christopher Plemmons taught her how to move in the kitchen, how to work the equipment and how to be in a “commercial kitchen as opposed to being in your home.” She said Nick Giovanni, hospitality management and food service director, taught her how to do the numbers, how to cost out food, how to order and keep inventory.
Lammers said he remembers Nys as “a great student, who loves people and creating works of art with food.”
She was hired on at Trophy Lake before she finished her associate degree and was able to apply the skills she learned to that position. She said she was proud of the fact that out of the nine other courses owned by Oki Golf, the company that manages Trophy Lake, she was the only female chef.
Nys said she also had one of the best food cost percentages in the company. Now she said she is trying to find ways to apply what she learned outside of school to her current job.
“(She) wants to make sure things are done especially to the book and that all the directions are followed and that everybody is doing what they are supposed to be doing. A result that has paid off for her in her career and she has moved up the ladder fairly quickly,” said Plemmons.
In her first days at OC, Nys said she remembers arriving at 6:05 a.m., since the chefs arrived at 6 a.m., even though class didn’t start until 7 a.m.
According to Nys, Plemmons got used to this and would always have something there for her to work on. She said the morning that she most remembers is when he had her making bread in the big commercial mixer.
“I got everything in there, the flour, the water and the yeast,” said Nys, when Plemmons yelled from his office for her to wait. He ran out to watch as she turned on the mixer.
“I turned it on and I got flour all over my face, my hair, everything, and he just chuckled. Thought it was the funniest thing. He said, ‘I forgot to show you, you are supposed to put plastic around the top so you don’t get flour everywhere,’” said Nys.
Then she said Plemmons walked back to his office “with his big white hat bobbing in the air,” while she stood there thinking, “I can’t believe he did that.”
Nys said he chuckled all day long, but she has never forgotten to put plastic around the top of anything in the big mixer.
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