Watercolor: North German Essentials XD

[eller]

If there is one color that defines the North German autumn, that would be this one.



Okay, technically, heather season is already over, but... It's definitely not a coincidence that I decided to produce this particular shade of granulating purple. 

In case you were wondering: yes, the Lüneburg Heath has some heather. XD That's a bit of an understatement, actually: heather bloom is such a spectacular view that people track it online so you can find the best spots for heather-viewing... (Oh, and they have pretty pictures, too.) Ah, unique North German hobbies. XD

By the way, the weather models predict the year's first frost for this weekend. Kale, YAY! (The kale plants need frost before they can be harvested and eaten.) I'm so looking forward to kale season! :)

Comments

[amberdreams]

Lovely shade - beautiful heather too.

[light_of_summer]

There are some very beautiful bearded irises in that color range, too 😀:

I Broke It
Autumn Years
Drunk Skunk

I'm surprised to hear that your kale needs frost before harvest. Is it really a need, or does it just taste better after a little frost? I'm pretty sure lots of the kale grown in California gets harvested without frost coming anywhere near it. Maybe we grow different varieties, but maybe we just don't have access to or know to appreciate the after-frost taste?

How do you like to eat kale? My favorite way is sauteed in olive oil with onions and garlic, with crumbled/cubed feta cheese added just a minute or two before serving over rice or pasta. 😋

[eller]

Those are beautiful! :D

Kale really needs frost because it has some interesting starch molecules that only break down when it's really cold, and some very tasty natural antifreeze proteins that are, unfortunately, only released when it's cold. I found an English-language explanation here, so, the phenomenon is known internationally, not just in North Germany. Otherwise, sure, you can eat the kale, but it will taste like shit. (Seriously. It's bitter.) I believe most places without natural frost induce that process artificially by flash-freezing the stuff directly after harvest (even if it's only for a few seconds in case of "fresh" kale - that won't give you the special proteins, but at least the starch-to-sugar thing), but in North Germany it's really a seasonal thing so nobody would buy kale before the first frost. (Just like nobody wants gingerbread for easter, even if it were available in the stores.)

Wow, don't get me started on regional ways of eating kale! XD That's the stuff of whole culture wars between different villages. I think you can draw a map based on how people eat their kale... But, in any case, it involves a lot of meat and a lot of alcohol.

[light_of_summer]

Thanks for the link!

Yeah, my experience of kale is that its taste is bitter-ish. The trick is to combine it with other flavors that balance that out: e.g., carmelized onion for sweetness & feta cheese for saltiness.

Competing village-specific kale recipes sound like they could be amusing, but I meant, what is YOUR favorite way to eat kale—you, Eller!?

With meat, hmmmm... Maybe with bacon? Or sausage? I'm just trying to imagine the possibilites. Alcohol pairs poorly with my metabolism, so I'd just be guessing, there—maybe a fruity red wine???

[eller]

"Yeah, my experience of kale is that its taste is bitter-ish."

Yeah, so, where I live, this would be considered a quality issue, and people would complain riot if someone sold them bitter kale... Cultural differences?!?

"what is YOUR favorite way to eat kale"

With kohlwurst (a kind of sausage that's boiled with the kale - despite the name, it does not contain any kale, it's just served with kale and nothing but kale) and pinkel (a product that's somewhat difficult to explain - I didn't find many English-language sources, but this short one at least got the main ingredients right).

Other types of meat often served with kale here are bacon (which is universal, I suppose XD) or Kasseler (cured pork that's brined and then usually hot-smoked) - I like that one fine and I'll eat it but I usually don't buy it.

"maybe a fruity red wine???"

Nah. Korn all the way. Usually, I don't drink hard liquor, but in this case, it's traditional and there's really nothing else that goes with the kale-kohlwurst-pinkel combination. XD

[light_of_summer]

Cultural differences? Quite possibly:

In your culture, do parents say the equivalent of "eat it because it's good for you!" when their children don't like the tastes of certain foods? In the USA, spinach and various brassicas are often the offending foods in these scenarios. That probably includes kale, for some children, although I first encountered kale as a young adult.

I feel like that childhood experience (of being admonished to eat regardless of taste) extends, in adulthood, to a subset of USA people who choose what they eat more by the foods' healthiness (or calorie count, which is by no means identical!) than by how those foods taste.

Some of those people give themselves virtuous airs about their food choices. And some claim to like the tastes of healthy foods better than foods that are more processed &/or fatty &/or sweetened. I suspect Puritan/Calvinist heritage may also play a part in this pattern.

And other people try for moderation about choosing healthily taste-challenged versus unhealthily tasty foods. I count myself as one of these. Whenever I've bought and cooked kale, its healthy reputation has been a significant factor in my choice. Some bitterness is just an expected part of choosing to eat "healthy" kale.

[eller]

"In your culture, do parents say the equivalent of "eat it because it's good for you!" when their children don't like the tastes of certain foods? In the USA, spinach and various brassicas are often the offending foods in these scenarios. That probably includes kale, for some children, although I first encountered kale as a young adult."

No. Leafy green vegetables, like kale and spinach, are usually not given to kids under ten at all, because they're considered to be unhealthy for kids. It's adult food, kind of like you also don't let little kids drink korn. Interestingly enough, there may even be a scientific basis to that claim (it's about oxalates, which the adult human body can deal with, but children's kidneys cannot yet), so, this is one of those things that are smack in the middle between folk superstition and serious science.

Either way, forcing a kid to eat something they want to spit out is not really done. Not just because it's clearly abusive (or at least in my culture it would be considered so), but because you want children to keep their spit-gross-things-out reflex. If parents continuously override that and teach their kid not to trust their own judgment of whether something is edible or not, sooner or later, that kid will eat something that's considerably more dangerous to them than the relatively harmless kale (which may or may not be slightly toxic to young children). North Germany has many poisonous plants. Humans (and animals) have a sense of taste for a reason.

"And other people try for moderation about choosing healthily taste-challenged versus unhealthily tasty foods."

See, that sounds kind of weird from my perspective - if something tastes bad, I'd assume there's some kind of evolutionary reason why my tastebuds are rebelling. (As in: yes, I suspect that a lot of what's being sold as "health food" actually isn't all that healthy. If it tastes like shit, that's a pretty good indicator it's not really meant for human consumption.) That being said, I actually like the taste of kale (and, for that matter, spinach, I've always loved spinach), so, maybe I'm the wrong person to ask...

[light_of_summer]

That is fascinating— definitely a cultural difference.

Never before in my life have I heard about leafy green vegetables being unhealthy for children. The closest I ever heard was something like "Your sense of taste changes as you get older—you might like spinach in a few more years."

Does that kidney-related hazard extend to lettuce, too? My childhood had a lot of green salad in it. I'm guessing it doesn't, because lettuce didn't elicit the kind of childhood taste reaction that I had to spinach.

Keeping the spit-out-gross-tastes reflex does sound sensible. I've never before heard of that rationale being followed in a family meals context, though. There are poisonous mushrooms and poisonous springs in some parts of the USA—we did hear about bad taste being a clue for the springs. For the mushrooms, taste wasn't even mentioned, it was just "don't eat any wild mushrooms unless a Real Expert tells you they're OK."

Families over here vary about whether or how much children are expected to eat foods that don't taste good to them. The rule in my own family was, "take a least one bite, or no dessert for you, tonight."

The stricter rule that my father grew up with was, "you don't get anything else to eat until you eat all your spinach." He told us about waking up the next morning to the bowl of leftover cold, canned spinach waiting for him at the foot of his bed. I strongly doubt that either of his parents had any idea that it might not be good for him.

The severity of that family rule may have had something to do with the serious economic depression they were in at the time—"don't waste food!" is definitely a value I grew up with, and it was almost certainly stronger when my dad was a child.

I also grew up with the sense that being "picky" about food was something mildly shameful. Does your culture have that? Ironically, for most of my adulthood, I've significantly restricted the kinds of foods I eat because of health problems that I wasn't aware that I had when I was a child—and the foods I needed to give up were mostly foods I liked, damn it!

These days, as with kale, I'm fine with eating spinach that's tastily combined with other foodstuffs. I haven't revisited the kind of very plainly prepared cooked spinach that I could not make myself swallow as a child, so I don't know if my tastes actually changed with the years or if I just didn't encounter the kinds of spinach-included dishes that I could enjoy until my late teens.

Either way, I never did acquire a taste for brussel sprouts. Unlike spinach, I was able to swallow them, as a child, but they've never tasted good to me. 😝

[eller]

"Never before in my life have I heard about leafy green vegetables being unhealthy for children."

The scientific rationale is this one: high-oxalate foods (the linked paper explicitly names spinach) are linked to kidney problems (specifically, kidney stones) in children. Obviously, traditional North German farmers were not reading medical publications, so the reason(s) for not feeding leafy greens to children may vary.

" The closest I ever heard was something like "Your sense of taste changes as you get older—you might like spinach in a few more years.""

It does that! I remember when I was really little, spinach smelled gross to me (and I didn't eat it), until then one day it smelled really nice (and I ate it). XD Never underestimate healthy reflexes!

"Does that kidney-related hazard extend to lettuce, too?"

I doubt it - lettuce is mostly water, so, if it contains anything, it would be a very low dose.

"Keeping the spit-out-gross-tastes reflex does sound sensible. I've never before heard of that rationale being followed in a family meals context, though."

Family meals are the context in which a kid learns how to treat potential food, no? If a kid is trained to override their taste reflex there, that reflex will be lost. So... what parents teach their kids is, "if it tastes bad or weird in any way, SPIT IT OUT and rinse your mouth!!! And if you don't know what it is, don't put it into your mouth in the first place!" I think I mentioned this in another context: my mother is so on the extreme side of this that she won't eat any plant she doesn't know how to farm. Which, of course, is a) a trained behavior, and b) an excellent way to avoid accidental poisonings: "only eat known crops" is an excellent way of keeping a kid safe...

"For the mushrooms, taste wasn't even mentioned, it was just "don't eat any wild mushrooms unless a Real Expert tells you they're OK.""

In North Germany, it's more like "don't eat any mushrooms". Seriously. There is not a single traditional North German dish that involves mushrooms. (I eat mushrooms, but only the ones that come from the supermarket, which were farmed rather than collected in the wild. And I'm very good at identifying the stuff that grows in this ecosystem, but the risk is still too high for my taste...) There is also a local joke about the main cause of death in "mushroom experts". XD

"The severity of that family rule may have had something to do with the serious economic depression they were in at the time—"don't waste food!" is definitely a value I grew up with, and it was almost certainly stronger when my dad was a child."

Ah. I mean, economic difficulties are known here, of course. (I mean, my parents both were children in post-war Germany, so they're still familiar with the situation of "either you eat what's there or you go hungry because there simply isn't anything else".) So, the whole "don't waste food" is a strong value here, in the region, and I grew up with that as well! Just, the need to keep your child safe from poisoning is still more important. (I suspect that the local children traditionally spend more time outside, unsupervised, than American children, who seem to be in the company of adults 24/7 until they turn 18?!?) So, yeah, kids are generally allowed to refuse foods. More like... If the parents know their kid doesn't eat a food, they're supposed to cook a smaller amount of that.

"I also grew up with the sense that being "picky" about food was something mildly shameful. Does your culture have that?"

Not really, but also, as I mentioned, people traditionally couldn't afford to be particularly "picky" about food. If a kid persistently refuses a certain food anyway, people will generally assume there's a serious reason for it (like, say, the kid feeling sick after eating it: there's no platt word for concepts like "allergy", but the general phenomenon that some people don't feel well after eating certain foods is known) and leave the matter alone. Pickiness beyond that is kind of rare. And, I mean, I was a picky eater as a kid: I completely refused fish (which is a staple food in North Germany!) and still don't eat most fish... The consequence of that was that, on some days, I ended up eating the side dishes (typically vegetables and potatoes) only. I didn't starve, my parents got to eat their tasty fish, everything's fine. No drama. XD

[wayfaringwordhack]

Fabulous color as always, and those photos! WOW. 😍

[spacebaozi]

Eller, I was thinking about watercolor paintings and what makes them appear professional/pleasing to the eye (regardless of Actual Skill Level), and Yoon suggested asking for your thoughts. My own theory (from watching, copying, thinking, etc) is having a good range of values and being generous with the pigment are 2, but I feel that I am missing something about brushstrokes. So I am here asking for your thoughts, but I realize it's intellectual labor, so feel free to ignore! I will continue to admire your watercolor and paints.

[eller]

Huh, a very interesting question! :D

"what makes them appear professional/pleasing to the eye"

As far as I can tell: composition. It's really the #1 thing, even before the "correctness" (in terms of proportions, perspective, etc.) of the underlying drawing. But, really, the main thing that makes an amateurish picture look amateurish is the lack of a clear focal point and/or path the viewer's eye is led through the picture. If that's missing... Well. I think it's the main reason some people, for example, are very accurately reproducing photos and getting everything "right", but the resulting picture still, somehow, doesn't look good/professional.

Even with completely abstract paintings, you can tell if it's an actual painting or a random blotchy mess. (Of course, you also occasionally see such a random blotchy mess in an art gallery, because a lot of art business is unrelated to actual skill. But still, there are tendencies.)

"having a good range of values"

...is very important! Basically, yes, if you do a digital black-and-white version of your picture and size it down to a thumbnail, the motif needs to be still recognizable. If that's not the case, the values are botched. I'd agree that's also a fast and easy way to distinguish between "amateur" and "professional-level" work.

"something about brushstrokes"

Huh. YES, I suppose, but... That's, somehow, more difficult to define, I think - because there is no one true way of handling brushstrokes. (In wet-in-wet work, you don't even see the actual brushstrokes in the finished painting.) Often enough, you can recognize an artist's work by their brushstrokes because it's so highly individual. Still, I'm not sure if you really can link this to the professionality of their work. (More like the opposite. If you're active in the art scene, you sometimes recognize stuff like, "aha, with this particular way of using the brush, this artist studied at Academy A and never developed an individual style beyond that" - in that case, "professional" brushwork would actually serve to disqualify an artist and their art!) It's more like... No matter which style you use, you need control. You cannot let your hand wobble around (unless you deliberately go for a loose style - it's complicated XD). You need to get the paint exactly where you want it to go on the paper. But... I'm not even sure this is an artistic skill rather than a purely technical one.

Then again, many "artistic" skills are really just technique (and entirely learnable) when it comes down to it, so... No idea.

[spacebaozi]

That was really thought provoking, thank you!