As we made the hour-plus drive from our college to her house during the Easter break of 1991, my best friend Rebecca gave me some delicious insight into her parents.
She told me her mom was a night-owl who loved nothing more than sleeping late, but her dad had to leave early for his workweek job. So early in their marriage, they agreed that her mom would handle the morning rush of getting three kids off to school, and her dad would do the weekends – making a “real” breakfast while he was at it. I quickly learned that Rebecca’s dad, Jim, took this work seriously, and over that long holiday weekend and many other visits during our college years, I enjoyed his delectable cornmeal-bacon waffles, Dutch babies, and my favourite – sourdough applesauce doughnuts.
I’ve thought of those doughnuts often during the pandemic, when it seemed like everyone suddenly started making their own sourdough. A strange silver lining of isolation has been that a lot of people have started doing or returning to a lot of very cool at-home activities.
So in a sense, sourdough inspired one of our main features in this issue of Wider Horizons. It turns out our Lethbridge College colleagues have a lot of great talents they willingly shared with readers, and you can read about them all starting on p. 16 (as well as scattered through different parts of the magazine). If you have an at-home activity you think fellow readers might like to try, drop me a line at [email protected] and we’ll be glad to share.
This issue also celebrates the college’s “makers, doers and thinkers,” including our Indigenous grandmothers who generously share their wisdom and compassion with the college community; a Heavy Equipment Technician grad and now instructor who is a talented photographer who uses old technologies to create beautiful new images; college researchers who are creating immersive virtual reality training programs to help caregivers manage the situations they may face while working with people with dementia; a Business Administration grad who has built a one-of-a-kind Lethbridge enterprise; and so much more.
Our whole team came together to create an issue that we hope will be welcome and engaging when it arrives in your mail in the new year. It has been a challenge to not be able to connect in the ways we are accustomed to, and we are all missing being together at convocation, Coulee Fest and Kodiaks games, as well as Thanksgiving, birthdays and winter holidays. But we hope this issue might help you feel connected to the college in other ways, even in these turbulent times.
As for me, I am going to finally jump on the sourdough bandwagon and try out some of the best recipes from Rebecca’s dad this holiday season. My goal is to have sourdough doughnuts ready for my family on Christmas morning. I’ll let you know how it goes!
Thanks for reading – and for trying new things this winter.
Lisa Kozleski, Editor
