每日大赛

Culinary Arts student and mother shares love of cooking

Nikki Turnmire remembers the first year she was old enough to bake Christmas cookies with her mom. She was so excited about holding the cookbook, and nothing, not even the 104-degree fever she woke up with the day they were supposed to bake the cookies, was going to stop her.

“That’s where it all started,” Turnmire said. “My mom made everything wonderful and special, and that was where I was able to connect with her. I discovered that you can make people really happy by bringing them food or sweets. So that's been my job, no matter what I've done in life, is making something in the kitchen and making people happy while making it beautiful.”

Turnmire has a “natural affinity” for all things that happen in the kitchen, and that’s what led to her baking business and most recently to 每日大赛’s Culinary Arts program.

Turnmire has homeschooled all her children, the youngest of whom is nearly ready to graduate from high school . As a result, Turnmire said, she started thinking about what her own next step should be, which led her to enroll at 每日大赛. 

While she has plenty of experience baking cakes professionally,   the commercial kitchen space she’s learning to work in at Pellissippi is different from anything she's experienced. 
 
“You never stop learning,” she said. “Learning happens for your entire life. That's what this naturally does. It continues what I'm going to be doing next, which also just feels like a great big question mark. But I love transition, and I love the question mark because I'm not in a set space, so that means I can decide whatever it is I want to decide when I get there.”

As a nontraditional student, Turnmire said she had some concerns about returning to school and being accepted by her classmates. As a mother with adult children, however, she felt prepared to bond with her fellow aspiring chefs.

“They didn’t start calling me ‘mom’ until after spring break,” she joked and has felt like an unofficial cheerleader  with her ability to encourage and put her classmates at ease and also have important conversations with them.

“Somehow I feel like I'm sitting at the cool kid table, and I don't know how I got there, but it's really exciting and it's fun,” she said. “And they have welcomed me where I feel like I'm part of the class and ... they are not making my age the lead story.”

Another reason for coming to Pellissippi: Her daughter is also a student at the college .

When she gets done with her classes at the Ruth and Steve Workforce Development Center on the Blount County campus, Turnmire said, she’ll just walk over to the main building to visit with her daughter and her friends.

“What's interesting is they don't always realize that I'm a student, but then once they realize, it's so fun to watch because then their whole entire attitude and their guard drops, and they're like, ‘Oh, you're one of us,’” she said.

Her relationship with her daughter has bloomed in a new way attending college together, she said, from their shared car rides to and from campus and now talking about taking a class together.

“It's just really developing our relationship even more,” Turnmire said. “I always knew I would love who she was as a grown-up, when I wasn't necessarily in charge of all the things, and it's proving true. So, I'm happy about that.”

When the weekend comes, Turnmire fulfills orders at her baking business.

Her next business plan? To become an at-home chef, who would prepare food for clients at their house for events or just meal-prepping for two-income households in which parents or guardians may not have the time to prepare meals themselves.

“My whole menu is Southern cuisine, but with a twist,” she said. “And the twist is that it's healthy – it's good for you ... It feels like that is the trajectory (my business is) going toward: to helping those families have healthy meals to feed their family.”