hot mushrooms: Let's Talk About 'Em

what kind of mushrooms are they, why are they hot, and why is that the name of my newsletter?

hot mushrooms is, obviously, never capitalised.

hot mushrooms has always been the name of this newsletter. I’ve had too many blogs, all of which were named names I am too embarrassed to remember or repeat here. hot mushrooms is my longest lasting internet writing repository.

hot mushrooms, fried and dipped in Czech tartar sauce (which, unless you’ve had it, is nothing like the tartar sauce you’re thinking about) is one of my favourite Czech bar foods. Also nakládaný hermelín, which is pickled cheese. Again, unless you’ve had it, pickled cheese does not taste anything like what you’re imagining. What a fun cuisine! (Bonus fun fact: there is no direct translation from English to Czech for the word “cuisine”. I found this out the first time an ESL student asked me “do you like Czech kitchen?” and I thought she was asking if I liked the kitchen in my flat in comparison to the American kitchens I grew up with.)

hot mushrooms got a little rebrand this weekend!

What do you think? This is not a rhetorical question. I would actually like to receive feedback on the logo and general visual vibe of this newsletter because visual stuff is not my forte.

hot mushrooms is my writer’s notebook. Like artists who post their sketches on social media. This is my sketching.

hot mushrooms is nonsense. The kind of nonsense one might find when following a white rabbit. The perfectly logical nonsense of an unbirthday. The nonsense of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings. Speaking of cabbage, the first few times I tried to buy iceberg lettuce in Prague I ended up with cabbage. This happened with, like, a lot of food items. Up to and including after I started dating Tom and I was finally able to cook with actual cumin.

hot mushrooms is how I translated the beginning of this plaque located in Naarden, The Netherlands. I fancy myself an amateur translator because while I can barely speak Czech and French, I can understand both languages fairly well. Although, I do have the habit of underestimating my speaking skills and overestimating my reading/listening skills. Which was the case with “horský hřeben” on this plaque, in a Dutch city, written in Czech:

Also, sometimes I speak before I think, so when I was trying to read this I suddenly yelled out “hot! mushrooms!” before I could re-think my translation.

My husband, a Czech person, is a native Czech speaker. After shouting “hot! mushrooms!” and giggling at myself he simply replied, “no.” I giggled some more and decided that I never need to know what “horský hřeben” actually means, because there is no way it’s as silly and fun as hot mushrooms.

This is a statue of Tom. Just kidding. This is a statue of Jan Amos Komenský who was “the teacher of the nations”, according to Tom. I’ll google how to spell the name but I don’t feel the need to double-czech (hahahaha) Tom’s description of the man. I feel like it’s super obvious that Komenský’s favourite food was hot mushrooms because his statue is in the same courtyard as the plaque about hot mushrooms.

hot mushrooms in Czech is actually horké houby, and if I ever want to hear Tom say “no” in that lovely way he does I just have to pronounce “houby” like “whoooo-bee”.

hot mushrooms perfectly describes the mycelium-like neural network of my brain that produces posts just like this one.

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As a post-script to this rather odd bit of writing I would like to ask my readers for some help. Writing is currently how I earn income and with the rise of “AI” text generators I’m in a precarious position. This newsletter is too personal and weird for me to set a subscription fee, but getting my writing in front of more eyes will greatly increase my chances of getting paid to play with words in a way no machine can. I would appreciate it if you could interact with this post by liking it or leaving a comment, or, better yet, share your favourite post on your preferred social media site.

Thank you for reading and I’ll see you next week!