Camosun College Employment Training and Preparation (ETP) students are holding a Winter Holiday Sale on Thursday, December 2.
Third-year ETP student Nathan Wong and ETP instructor Laura Friesen say that among other items for sale will be conifer cookies, rosemary cookies, apple chips, and roasted chick peas in a special sauce (courtesy of Camosun’s Mosaic Tastes), all made by Camosun ETP students.
“We have a whole list of stuff,” says Friesen. “Because the Farm to Table program is all about local food and it’s also combining some of our gardening, like the cookies is something that one of the students brought in a recipe that they had done with their community before… We’re making a cedar chai, which will be something that people can come and get a cup of, cedar chai brewed with milk and different spices. We have dehydrated apples from my dad’s apple tree that produced about 1,000 apples this year, so we used some of his apples to make apple chips. All stuff we’ve made with our hands and all stuff that we’ve either learned about in class or we’ve grown or we’ve got from our community.”
Friesen says that one things students can take away from the sale is the importance of local food supplies.
“When we look at all these rain storms happening, and supply chains being disrupted, highways collapsing, people running out of gas, we want people to know that there’s food here, there’s food in the local area, and that there’s people doing all sorts of neat things to contribute to food security in our region, and our program helps with that,” she says. “That’s what we’re learning about, so we hope they learn a little bit from the things they buy from us.”
Friesen says that a return to in-person classes has been good for ETP, but they managed during COVID.
“It’s funny, because with COVID, it was hard for us to think about doing what we do online because we teach so much hands-on,” she says. “We teach food preparation and we teach growing food, and we teach people skills, so we would send kits of equipment and ingredients home to students and I think that we did an okay job. We had a lot of fun, we spilled a lot of dirt on our keyboards, and spilled water, my office was full of all sorts of strange things, like zucchini that had gone all mouldy inside one of my chairs. So I think we did okay, but when we come back in person we realize how much more magic there is when we’re together.”
Wong says that this semester’s return to in-person learning has been positive.
“This semester has been good,” says Wong. “It’s been really good. We still have the masks on every day of class; we can take them off when we’re outside. But other than that, it seems normal.”
The Winter Holiday Sale (which is cash-only) runs from 12 pm to 1:30 pm at the LACC second floor foyer in the Campus Centre at Interurban.
“We’re taking a tree and making a cookie out of it,” says Wong, “and it’s really good.”