I don’t have any interesting tips, to be honest. If anybody on here does, please chime in. I make a lot of stews, and I usually simply drop the mushrooms in without any extra prep.

For instance, for lunch today I made split peas with carrots, spinach, and lion’s mane mushrooms.

I tore them up in my hands and just plonked them in. They are good when you don’t want to use meat, and a package of one large and two medium costs $5 around here. This package lasts me for 3 meals (although Klara doesn’t eat mushrooms). People say they taste like crab meat but I don’t really see the likeness.

Lion’s mane is tender to the touch, so I added it at the end of the cooking process. With shiitakes, on the other hand, I’d put them first because they are tough and take forever.

I’m seeing the mushroom dude again tomorrow and I’ll buy some unusual mushrooms. I’ll post the recipe of what I do with them. In the meantime, if anybody has any suggestions or tips, please share.

This is a great question I had a burning desire to answer but I never know if anybody would be interested, so thank you for giving me a chance to delve into this subject.

Arestovych became a target of a massive online hate campaign when he misspoke in the aftermath of one of the most horrific airstrikes by Russia against the city of Dnipro. People are traumatized and emotions fly high, so he had to resign from his government position as a result of this clumsy wording he chose. I was at a live event with him 10 minutes before he misspoke and he was offering psychological help to a woman (not me) in a terrible personal situation. He dragged her out of her awful mental state at a significant personal cost. I saw it, and I’ll never stop admiring a person who would go out like this for a complete stranger.

Arestovych was absolutely wiped out after that event and as a result he misspoke, which cost him his career. Yet he never mentioned that woman to explain what happened. Again, nothing but deep admiration is what I feel towards such extraordinary self-restraint and truly Christian charity. (Arestovych is deeply religious).

What happened when the wave of anger over his comments was unleashed is that he never closed himself up as self-defense. There was a lot of macho posturing in this as he kept repeating that he’s completely immune to the opinions of strangers. But he’s not immune. Nobody is. He’s walking wounded and it will take time to recover. He’s been fumbling since then, making more missteps but I’m the last person to judge a fellow for losing his footing after such events.

On the positive side, he’s been in the US for some time now, meeting with conservative politicians and thinkers (e.g. Jordan Peterson whom he deeply respects). Now he’s finally bringing to Ukrainian audiences a serious, meaningful and reliable analysis of what’s happening in the US. This is invaluable and long overdue given that there hasn’t been much change in the understanding of the West since we discussed it in Soviet kitchens behind the Iron Curtain.

We are experiencing a fascinating media kerfuffle in Ukraine right now. A famous Russian liberal and anti-Putin journalist Yulia Latynina had an on-air debate with the famous Jewish Ukrainian journalist Portnikov, and guess who got drubbed within an inch of their life in that dialogue?

Now, Latynina is very anti-Putin and lives in exile. She’s as anti-regime as a Russian can be. But her anti-Putinism – just like Navalny’s, just like every Russian anti-Putinist’s – is limited to the belief that as soon as the people of Russia understand how much money Putin has stolen, they’ll immediately overthrow the regime.

For 20 years, Russian anti-Putinists have been doing their darndest to demonstrate that Putin steals. One would have to be deaf, blind, and in a coma to not get the message. But the more Putin steals and the more obscene is the luxury in which he lives, the more he is loved in Russia. The “he steals” narrative, however, refuses to die, reminding me of the Dems’ unhealthy attachment to the “Bush lied” slogan that lost them the 2004 election. Yes, I’m that old, I still remember all that.

Beyond this “Putin steals” message, Latynina eagerly mouths every imperialistic Russian slogan. “Russians and Ukrainians are brothers, this is a civil war, Ukraine never had its own culture, etc.” The funny side of this situation is that her own imperialism got her into a sea of trouble. She decided to engage in a public dialogue with a Ukrainian journalist whose knowledge of history is sublime. She expected Portnikov to play the role of a subservient, uneducated country bumpkin that she expects every Ukrainian to be. As a result, he unleashed on her a torrent of information while she clapped her eyes and bleated “yes, but” incoherently.

“Turn on YouTube!” I texted my husband during the show. “Portnikov is committing unnatural sexual acts against Latynina.”

Aside from the specifics of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, it was highly enjoyable to see smug ignorance getting crushed by knowledge and competence. The saddest thing about stupid people is that they don’t know they are stupid. It’s the high-IQ folks who have the intelligence to be aware of their intellectual limitations and would never enter a debate with a specialist on a subject of which they know nothing.

52 Ukrainian writers and translators have been killed by Russia so far in the current war.

The moment Ukrainian culture enters into a period of flourishing, Russians organize yet another Executed Renaissance. This is a term that was first introduced to describe the murder of pretty much the entirety of the Ukrainian cultural elite during Stalinism. Nothing remotely similar happened to Russian artists, of course. Stalin only killed writers who wrote in Russian if they a) insulted him personally and b) were Jewish. Everybody else – no matter how countercultural – lived and remained free. They wouldn’t get published and would experience penury, but the Russian-language Bulgakov, Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, Pasternak, etc could be as anti-regime as they wanted, and nobody touched them.

At the time when the executions of Ukrainian artists began, there were about 250 of them. At the end of Stalin’s murderous wave, only about 30 remained alive. And still, they managed to preserve the culture and the literature. It’s an incredible story of how people save their culture from extermination in the midst of one of the most brutal totalitarian regimes in history.

Today, we are experiencing the extermination of Ukrainian culture by Stalin’s fans and followers all over again.