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

In SELF’s new franchise, The Food I Try to eat When I’m Feeling…, we communicate with cooks, celebs, athletes, and men and women in the culinary area about the certain foodstuff or meals they transform to amid specific emotions—and how feeding on their favorites performs a crucial purpose in their self-care.

Chef and recipe developer Meredith Hayden, 26, has no challenge developing uniquely fulfilling menus for her consumers, irrespective of whether she’s planning a seafood-themed meal for the family members she cooks for in the Hamptons or getting ready a lunch unfold highlighted by her famed pink pasta for a corporate catering task. In point, she’s amassed far more than 800,000 TikTok followers who tune in to find out what she’s heading to place alongside one another future.

But right after a long day of building meals for other men and women, contemplating about what to make herself for supper can be overwhelming.

“When I’m by myself, by yourself, and I’m burned out from get the job done, the past point I want to do is uncover a new recipe, make a grocery listing, and go to the grocery retailer, and then examine that recipe and cook,” Hayden, who posts less than the tackle @WishboneKitchen, tells SELF. “When you are sensation anxious and overstimulated, the last matter you want to do—especially in New York City—is go away your apartment and go to the retail store.”

So on times when her tension is at max place, Hayden keeps a dish that is minimal on hard work and significant on reward at the all set: spaghetti pomodoro.

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The dish, which goes from conception to bowl in about 15 minutes, calls up memories from Hayden’s childhood, when a bowl of spaghetti with pink sauce served as her go-to comfort and ease food stuff. This grown-up edition provides all the fulfillment of the authentic 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 actually just a savory bomb,” says Hayden.

There is satisfaction in the garlic-ahead, creamy dish by itself, but there is also consolation in the routine-ness of it. Hayden, who was diagnosed with ADHD at 12, states that ever due to the fact she was a kid, earning decisions—even on little factors, like what shirt she’d don to university or what she’d have for breakfast—could sense overpowering for the duration of instances of high strain. So now as an grownup, taking the problem of what to eat for meal off the desk can give her the time she desires to decompress and permit her thoughts silent down from the chaos of the working day.

And her times can get busy: Hayden will work as a personal chef—she cooks for the very same loved ones in the metropolis all through the tumble to the spring, then travels out to the Hamptons every weekend with them during the summer—and a caterer for New York–based situations and dinner parties, all although generating articles for TikTok and Instagram, developing brand name partnerships, and self-publishing two cookbooks.

Prior to she turns 30, she tells SELF, she hopes to transform all of this practical experience into a cookbook developed by a conventional publisher, just one in which her experience in home-cooking—versus “overly fussy extravagant food” targeted far more on appearance above taste—can definitely glow.