PSCS PROFILES
Nic Warmenhoven
Teaching Staff
When Nic Warmenhoven was 14 years old, he received an unusual gift. Nic was an active kid who liked playing Dungeons and Dragons, riding his bike, and organizing his friends into fantasy baseball leagues. His mother thought it would be a good idea to give him a cookbook.
“Her philosophy of gifts is that you should give someone something they’ll enjoy and they would never get for themselves,” he says. Nic enjoyed baking cookies in high school, but he didn’t know what to do with a huge cookbook. He held on to it though, all through high school, and brought it with him when he went to college.
In the summer of 1993, Nic lived two blocks from the University District farmers market and would drift over there and to look around and mingle among the crowd. He found himself handling exotic vegetables, wondering what kind of meal one could make with them. “I can go home and look up all the things I can do in this cookbook,” he remembers thinking.
Nic, who is married with two children of his own, still has a spot on his kitchen shelf reserved for Mom’s cookbook, now tattere
d from use.
When Nic was hired at PSCS, he took full advantage of the school’s emphasis on teaching what you love. He offered a class called History of the American Pantry (“an exploration of the changes in Americans’ eating and food purchasing habits since the Revolutionary War”). He has also taught Spanish, pre-calculus, evolutionary biology, constitutional law, and has directed the student play for the past eight years. “There are very few things that I’m not interested in,” he says.
He’s most in his element on Mondays in the fall, when he brings a half dozen students to the Oxbow organic farm in Carnation. Nic and the students pull weeds, transplant crops from the greenhouse to the field, and talk to Adam and Luke, the guys who run the farm.
Students get to be outdoors and work with their hands, and many of them have a passion for quality food and gardening. Plus, it’s peaceful on the farm.
“Anything that gets them out of the school building is great,” Nic says, “because it expands their notion of the places in which people can learn.”
Nic and the students always eat lunch with Adam and Luke, and Nic uses that time to ask questions. “How much money did you make at the farmers market this week?” he’ll ask. “What are you planting for next year? How do you make decisions about things like that? Are people really buying purple sprouting broccoli at $8 a pound?” Sometimes, the questions are for the benefit of the students, and sometimes he’s just curious.
“I would find it all fascinating even if the kids weren’t there.”