Cindy Sil­vert is the author of The Hun­gry Love Cook­book: 30 Steamy Sto­ries, 120 Mouth­wa­ter­ing Recipes. She is guest blog­ging here all week as part of the Vis­it­ing Scribe series on The ProsenPeo­ple.

I always knew that I would write short sto­ries. I didn’t dream they’d be these sto­ries, pack­aged so lov­ing­ly into this sil­ly book, but I knew I’d write. With a taste for the trag­ic (Paul Johnson’s A His­to­ry of the Jews), the wacky (Gary Shteyngart’s The Russ­ian Debu­tan­te’s Hand­book) and his­tor­i­cal biogra­phies (books about the guys who built this coun­try, dreamed Israel into real­i­ty, Stacey Schiff’s page-turn­ing Cleopa­tra, etc.), I was as sur­prised as any­one when The Hun­gry Love Cook­book spilled out of me. So how do I explain it? 

Just as the body swells to cre­ate a nat­ur­al cast, a cocoon of sorts, for an injured or del­i­cate part, so too writ­ing is my way of not hav­ing to think about ISIS, col­lege funds, or retire­ment. I always thought that cre­ative was my family’s code word for stu­pid: ​“Cindy is so… cre­ative!” So after dab­bling in the­ater and visu­al arts, I got myself an MBA to prove I wasn’t a com­plete dolt.

Still, how does a nice Jew­ish girl from the sub­urbs come up with 30 tawdry tales — and why pair them with a kosher cook­book? Isn’t kosher cook­ing dif­fi­cult enough? If you’ve read even one of the sto­ries in The Hun­gry Love Cook­book, you know that they’re a lot more inno­cent than they’re cracked up to be, and that I’m a bit of a weirdo. I’m that per­son who laughs at that part of the movie that no one else laughs at. I don’t usu­al­ly get jokes print­ed on T‑shirts and, at the risk of being labeled a freak, I’m not tick­lish. Way back when, a friend (yes, a friend) nick­named me Marsh­mal­lows and Dag­gers: I can be both uber-sen­si­tive and less than kind. It’s all in a day’s work: I’m a writer.

The thing about being a writer is that, well, I’m just not that spe­cial any­more. Once upon a time being an author meant some­thing: pour­ing your tor­tured soul and sul­lied past onto paper, thus mak­ing fam­i­ly rela­tion­ships even worse while pro­vid­ing yet more fod­der for your ever-oblig­ing ther­a­pist. You had some­thing to be proud of! Now everyone’s a blog­ger, a pho­tog­ra­ph­er, a social com­men­ta­tor. And a lot of these peo­ple are tak­ing up excel­lent caus­es. Just about every­one on Face­book seems to have more of a social con­science than I do, and I thought I was one of the good guys. But I digress. How and why write in this del­uge of thoughts and words? Well for one, at least I’m not con­fined to dis­till­ing my life’s work into no more than 140 char­ac­ters. And frankly, I’m too old, prick­ly, and opin­ion­at­ed to get a real job. 

The fact is, in every rein­car­na­tion of my career path, I was essen­tial­ly mak­ing every­thing up. Whether I was Cindy the actor, the direc­tor, the teacher or the florist, I was invent­ing, cre­at­ing, paint­ing a pic­ture or sorts. For The Hun­gry Love Cook­book, I’ve paint­ed 30 over-the-top scenes that you can rel­ish with or with­out food. True to my Marsh­mal­low-Dag­ger nature, I’ve con­trast­ed gen­res, time peri­ods, and tech­niques in shar­ing some of my favorite dish­es driz­zled on top in the hopes of mak­ing you smile as you churn out meal after meal, be it for your­self or a whole clan of ingrates. If that’s you, you deserve a break. I would know. 

Cindy Sil­vert is a food colum­nist, humor writer, and self-taught cook. She is cur­rent­ly tour­ing for the 2016 – 2017 sea­son on her book The Hun­gry Love Cook­book through the JBC Net­work.

Relat­ed Content:

• Glo­ria Spiel­man: My First Writ­ing Group: The Internet
• Adam Langer: I’m No Longer Just an Author
• Jes­si­ca Sof­fer: The Nuts and Bolts of Writing