Chef Meredith Hayden on the Meals She Eats When She’s Emotion Anxious: Spaghetti Pomodoro

In SELF’s new franchise, The Meal I Take in When I’m Feeling…, we converse with chefs, celebs, athletes, and persons in the culinary house about the distinct food items or meals they convert to amid specific emotions—and how eating their favorites plays a very important purpose in their self-treatment.

Chef and recipe developer Meredith Hayden, 26, has no trouble generating uniquely enjoyable menus for her consumers, whether she’s organizing a seafood-themed meal for the household she cooks for in the Hamptons or planning a lunch spread highlighted by her well-known pink pasta for a corporate catering work. In actuality, she’s amassed much more than 800,000 TikTok followers who tune in to locate out what she’s going to place alongside one another next.

But following a lengthy working day of generating foods for other people today, pondering about what to make herself for dinner can be overwhelming.

“When I’m by myself, by itself, and I’m burned out from get the job done, the final thing I want to do is come across a new recipe, make a grocery list, and go to the grocery retail outlet, and then browse that recipe and prepare dinner,” Hayden, who posts under the take care of @WishboneKitchen, tells SELF. “When you’re sensation anxious and overstimulated, the final thing you want to do—especially in New York City—is go away your condominium and go to the store.”

So on days when her anxiety is at max issue, Hayden retains a dish that is very low on energy and significant on reward at the all set: spaghetti pomodoro.

The dish, which goes from conception to bowl in about 15 minutes, calls up reminiscences from Hayden’s childhood, when a bowl of spaghetti with red sauce served as her go-to comfort foodstuff. This grown-up edition brings all the pleasure of the initial but kicks up the umami thanks to the garlic, butter, olive oil, and Parmesan cheese that complement the acidity of the cooked-down cherry tomatoes.

“It’s seriously just a savory bomb,” says Hayden.

There is pleasure in the garlic-forward, creamy dish alone, but there’s also consolation in the routine-ness of it. Hayden, who was identified with ADHD at 12, suggests that ever considering that she was a kid, generating decisions—even on small issues, like what shirt she’d wear to school or what she’d have for breakfast—could really feel overpowering all through moments of substantial pressure. So now as an adult, getting the question of what to eat for meal off the desk can give her the time she needs to decompress and permit her intellect silent down from the chaos of the day.

And her days can get hectic: Hayden functions as a private chef—she cooks for the identical household in the metropolis in the course of the tumble to the spring, then travels out to the Hamptons every weekend with them through the summer—and a caterer for New York–based situations and dinner functions, all when developing written content for TikTok and Instagram, establishing brand name partnerships, and self-publishing two cookbooks.

Before she turns 30, she tells SELF, she hopes to turn all of this encounter into a cookbook developed by a common publisher, one particular where by her knowledge in home-cooking—versus “overly fussy extravagant food” centered additional on visual appeal over taste—can seriously glow.