On Leftovers: How Cooking Alone Helped Me Write Together

A guest post from writer Kelsey Erin Shipman

You are reading Letters from Hannah. If you like it and want more in your inbox, please subscribe.

In the first year of my daughter’s life, I spent a lot of time alone. My days often started at 5 or 6 a.m. with a baby on my hip and no car in the driveway. I’d try to squeeze in a few minutes of grading for my online college classes or, if the stars aligned, add a paragraph or two to my novel during an increasingly narrow window of naptime. That was before the contact naps, of course, before I became a full-time mattress with opinions.

It was hard, like it is for most moms. The kind of hard that makes you forget what you’re good at, or if you were ever good at anything to begin with. My daily relief came not from rest, but from a routine that reminded me I was still myself. When my husband got home and took the baby, I’d crack open a Belgian sour ale, turn on an episode of The Splendid Table, and unpack the CSA box that arrived twice a week like a gift from my pre-motherhood self. I didn’t always know what to do with a watermelon radish or a leggy parsnip, but I loved the small act of figuring it out—pickling, frying, tasting, improvising.

It wasn’t about dinner. It was about creation. A private, slightly tipsy communion with myself in a kitchen that still felt like mine.

When it Was Just Me, My Cast Iron, and Craft Beer

Before the baby, before nap schedules and sleep regressions and sweet potato permanently embedded in the carpet, I had a different kind of kitchen life.

After nine-hour days teaching public school—where an angry freshman once hurled scissors at my face and students regularly stole quarters out of my purse—I’d come home utterly depleted. I woke up each morning bracing for chaos, and I walked in the door each evening wrecked from it. But no matter how exhausted I was at the end of the day, I still cooked.

I ignored the dishes in the sink. I poured a beer from one of my favorite local breweries. I zipped barefoot through the kitchen with music playing while my dog lounged on the couch. I chopped and stirred and roasted until I felt like myself again. Cooking became my ritual of survival—a way to reclaim a part of me that didn’t belong to grading, classroom management, or fussy parents. It was joy. It was creativity. It reminded me who I was.

Most nights, I’d come home and scan the fridge for inspiration. It wasn’t a performance. It wasn’t planned. It was pure pleasure: sautéing collard greens in garlic and lemon, roasting the one sweet potato I had, and folding it all into a hot tortilla. I wasn’t feeding anyone but myself, and that was the point. There was no one to impress, no dietary quirks to accommodate—just me, my cast iron pan, and whatever sounded good in the moment.

I loved to cook with my great-grandfather’s cast irons—family relics that, out of four grandkids, somehow landed with me. In those pans I made black bean tacos topped with garden tomatoes and fresh cilantro. Garlic-ginger tofu with broccoli and toasted sesame seeds on top. Lemony pasta kissed with white wine and crushed red pepper. These meals fed me twice—once for dinner, once again in the windowless break room I shared with twelve other burned-out teachers eating out of Tupperware and trying not to cry.

This turned out to be training for the blur and burnout of early motherhood, and for the daily work of remembering myself. Cooking for one was an act of creative self-love. It was just me, moving and tasting and trusting my senses. It made me feel like an artist again.

Finding My People (and My Way Back to the Page)

For a long time, writing felt like something I had to steal time for. During my years teaching public school, my creative work slowed to a crawl. Between lesson plans, classroom chaos, and nights spent grading papers through blurry eyes, I wrote in barely decipherable fragments.

When my daughter was born, even those scraps disappeared. My attention was completely consumed by her needs and my own exhaustion. The ideas didn’t stop coming, but I couldn’t hold onto them. They got buried beneath burp cloths and the bone-deep fatigue that comes from keeping a tiny person alive.

It felt like a hole in the center of my chest, in the center of myself. The ache to write was always there. If anything, it got louder. I didn’t just want to write. I needed to. The rare moments I had to myself felt precious, and I couldn’t bear to spend them on anything but the one thing I desperately wanted: to write.

That’s what eventually led me to ghostwriting and book collaboration. At first, it felt like a compromise—writing someone else’s story instead of my own. But it turned out to be something else entirely: a way to re-enter the literary world through the back door.

I started small, helping grandparents write memoirs to preserve their life stories for future generations. I wrote a few thought books for entrepreneurs and business owners. Then came the chefs, the beverage experts, the food bloggers—people brimming with flavor and memory and a deep desire to share it all. I helped them shape those passions into books. And somewhere in the process, I found myself again.

Being in community with these creatives reminded me why I started writing in the first place. Their kitchens were loud and alive—full of improvisation, opinion, and joy. We talked about food like it was the only thing that could contain what it means to be human. We shared beloved cookbooks with bent pages and sauce stains. I remembered what it felt like to make something that feeds people.

My clients often ask me what kind of cookbook I’d write, and I usually laugh—because who has the time? But it’s helpful to get to know each other, to uncover the dream beneath the dream.

In one version, it’s humble and slightly chaotic, like my current life. A book that starts with a nearly empty fridge and ends with a deeply satisfying meal. I imagine a top-down photo of bowls of wild herb hummus, pickled radishes, toasted sourdough, white bean soup, a wine glass tipped to one side, and a crayon drawing peeking out from under the placemat. Maybe I’d call it The Fridge Forager or Leftovers & Love Notes.

In another version—the book I’ll write when the house is quiet again—it’s a garden cocktail book, every recipe steeped with backyard botanicals and served in mismatched glassware under string lights.

Either way, it would be the kind of book you eat over the sink, surprised that it tastes better than it did yesterday.

That’s the other thing community gives you: permission. Not just to write again, but to write as you are—messy, tired, and in progress. Cooking for one helped me reconnect with myself. Writing with others helped me return to my voice. Both reminded me that you don’t always need an audience to start. But when you do invite people in? It’s even better.

The Best Ideas Start in the Kitchen (and End in a Book Deal)

These days, the kitchen rarely belongs to just me. My daughter insists on helping by stirring bowls of pancakes with far too many chia seeds, sneakily eating bites of batter, and dropping spoonfuls on the floor for the dog. My husband hovers, offering to grate cheese or wash dishes, or just marveling at whatever last minute meal I’ve cobbled together. It’s chaotic, joyful, and loud. I don’t always get to move at my own pace—but I do get to watch the people I love enjoy something I made with my own two hands.

And that changes everything.

One of our longest-running arguments is about our restaurant budget. I’d eat out every weeknight if I could. He’d rather stay home and watch me turn leftovers into a small miracle. And when he bites into something weird and wonderful I’ve thrown together—like grilled sourdough stuffed with ginger-sautéed chard and a slice of Ossau-Iraty—I can’t help but admit he has a point.

There’s a different kind of magic that happens when you create with others in mind. The same is true in writing. Writing alone is where you get weird, wild, and wonderfully unhinged. It’s where you try things without needing approval. It’s the first draft at midnight. The notebook scribble while stirring a pot. It matters deeply. But just like cooking, writing becomes something else entirely when you invite other people in.

Community doesn’t mean compromise. It means momentum. Writing alone is where you find your voice, but writing in community is where you learn to trust it. It’s structure and support and occasional cheerleading, yes—but more than that, it’s proof that your story matters. It’s where your work meets the world, and suddenly, what felt small or uncertain becomes something meaningful. Something shared.

Join us! Dream to Deal: Book Proposal Workshop

You don’t need a book deal to start taking your work seriously. You just need a place to show up, shape your ideas, and be reminded that they matter. Dream to Deal is that place. It’s where you stop waiting for permission and start building something real—with structure, support, and a community that gets it. Not everything you write will land. But it will move you forward. Someone, somewhere, is hungry for exactly what you’re working on.

Classes start July 9th. AND you’ll get $100 off with code SAVE100.