If you haven’t done this before, you might be pretty stoked about this whole social distancing/quarantine scenario. Working in your PJ’s? Spending extra time with your pets? Sending emails from the comfort of your couch? What a dream! Thanks, terrible pandemic! There really is a silver lining for everything!

Alas… this advice will be here for you in a few days when that excitement fades, and the frustration sets in.

1. Get Dressed.

If you usually take a shower in the morning, don’t skip it. Change into some clothes that make you feel like a person. Put on shoes. If you wear makeup regularly, at least put on a little bit. This may feel stupid. But there is absolutely a psychological effect when you do this. …

I almost got a breakfast tattoo–thrice. I’m not messing around. To me, there’s nothing more decadent than the combination of breakfast sausage, crispy waffles, greasy corned beef hash, over-easy eggs, and a cup of sweet coffee. This would for sure be my final meal on death row, the hypothetical “one meal I’d get for the rest of my life” if I had to choose, and has been the basis of my brand for over a year now. The syrup-drenched trenches of my preferential heart are overflowing with butter, hollandaise, and oj.

So what I’m saying is, I’m a bit biased.

It could be the family breakfast joint my grandparents ran, or the fact that I grew up in New Jersey (the diner capital of the world). …

Don’t you hate it when people post recipes, but make you scroll through a novel’s worth of words containing a neatly tied-in personal experience? That’s not going to happen here. Because I already did that in this piece. You’re welcome.

But it’s not all good news.

I do still have a few things to say about red sauce. And I refuse to be brief. It’s just not in my wheelhouse.

Why does red sauce suck SO BAD?

At the risk of being horribly maimed by the Italian mafia, this needs to be said: red sauce is overused. It’s. Freaking. Everywhere. …

It’s been nearly a year since my partner Doug and I moved to Lancaster. Land of scrapple, whoopie pies, and Amish country. Home to the oldest farmer’s market in the USA. County of conservative voters, trump rambo flags, and women who ask about my “husband”, and how many children I have.

I couldn’t love it more.

After 10 years of aimlessly bouncing around Philadelphia, just searching for a place that felt like home, Lancaster seemed to call me to its rolling pastures with open arms. It was a cultural rarity, the way its entire community committed to taking care of one another — the way it prioritized its local market, small businesses and protected lands. …

Our super-hip content company needs hopeless freelance writers to throw their dignity in the garbage and write laboriously boring blog posts for companies falling behind in the wake of overwhelming technological advancement!

I promise we are super cool- here’s an edgy, modern slang phrase to prove it: that’s the TEA! See, we’re trying to portray a relaxed, laid back Google-vibe so that you are lulled into a false sense of STOKE-ED-NESS to work for us. We want you to feel seen. Pretty cool, huh?

You wanna know the coolest thing, though? You’ll get to WORK FROM HOME. It’s not that we’re hiring hundreds of writers at once, so we can churn out endless piles of low quality word vomit week-to-week, and we couldn’t possibly hire exclusively local freelancers at that volume. …

I can tell you the exact moment that I realized I couldn’t be a chef in a professional kitchen.

I’d been working for the restaurant for a month already- workshopping recipes, setting up stations, and preparing equipment for its highly anticipated opening.

On this particular day, we were hosting a “friends and family” dinner to emulate a regular night of service. I was in charge of cooking off twelve loaves of sourdough bread, which they anticipated using all of.

So there wasn’t much room for error.

As I’m sure you can predict, it didn’t end up well. I was super new to the kitchen setting— let alone the concept of baking — and running about three hours behind schedule. Ultimately, the loaves over-proofed in their baskets, losing their shape and plopping out into my dutch ovens like gelatinous blobs of pudding. …

It’s the time of year where Netflix presents us with the notoriously formulaic, mawkishly romantic, and detectably low budget holiday films we all know and love.

They’re predictable! They’re relatable! The male protagonists are thoughtful and moderately decent! They’re everything a 20–40 year old cis single/unhappily committed white middle class woman could ever ask for (and me. I like them, too).

My personal favorite of 2018 was The Spirit of Christmas — in which a sexy ghost and a high powered lawyer bicker until they break some curse, or whatever, leaving women everywhere secretly thinking, “ghosts, eh?”

Unfortunately, it’s since been removed from Netflix, leaving us with lesser masterpieces such as “A Christmas Prince”, “The Princess Switch”, and “Christmas with a View”. …

Each day of December barely makes an appearance- the sun hangs low behind a veil of white clouds, hardly making any attempt to shine, disappearing shortly after lunch. I notice lately I’ve been spending a few extra minutes in the shower, teasing the knob in tiny millimeters to the left, just to see how hot I can stand the water.

It’s the only thing that warms my bones.

I’ve also been waking up slower — my music repertoire weaving in and out of moody jazz tracks, classic piano, and ambient shoegaze — and I’ve been drinking a little more coffee, eating a little more sugar, feeling a little more quiet. …