A little of this and a little of that

liz

Once a week, on Wednesdays, Sam Sifton publishes a “No-Recipe Recipe” as part of his Editor’s email to readers of The New York Times’ food section. The dishes run the gamut from sophisticated sandwiches to chowder. His Hasselback Kielbasa (which emerges from the oven bearing an uncanny resemblance to a Giant African Millipede) has become a dinner staple at our house.

Since the early days of quarantine, when many ingredients were absent from supermarket shelves, we’ve leaned heavily on no-recipe recipes. Generally, they are easily adaptable and I tend to be an improvisational chef anyway.

There is no recipe for this year. Under normal circumstances, the process I am going through to restore myself to mental wellness, although challenging, would also be somewhat straightforward. Work with my psychiatrist to manage medication and engage with my therapist around the most significant aspects of my depression, anxiety, PTSD, and OCD. In 2020, in addition to all of that, I’m also trying to manage living through a pandemic, an economic depression, and a social uprising. We all have a lot weighing on us and no cookbook to which to turn.

I’ve found that things I cook rarely look like the picture shown next to the recipe. In real life, there are no food stylists ready to plate and glamorize my creations. Although I am handy with my iPhone, my food is not photographed and edited by a professional.

Whatever picture I had in my head for this year, the reality will not match. However, I’m not lamenting it. In my experience, what I make may not resemble the picture, but it almost always turns out to be delicious. And that is the hope I carry with me now. For a future that may not be what I expected, but in which I can find delight nonetheless.

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Published by liz

From history major, with side quests in Medieval Studies and chemical engineering, to nonprofit finance leader, Big 4 tax partner, technologist, researcher, and now co-founder of Divine, nothing about my career has been linear. The throughline has always been systems: financial systems, organizational systems, technological systems, and human systems. I have an MBA in Operations and Supply Chain Management and a PhD in Organizational Leadership Psychology, and I’ve spent my career trying to understand how complex systems shape people’s choices, opportunities, wellbeing, and sense of belonging. Today, my work sits at the intersection of psychology, technology, human-centered design, and digital trust. I am co-founder of Divine, an open-source, decentralized social video app built to put creativity back in human hands and replace doomscrolling with joyscrolling. Divine is part of a bigger question I care deeply about: how do we create online spaces that support safety, creativity, identity, and belonging without defaulting to surveillance, extraction, or control? At Divine, I wear a lot of hats across engineering, finance, operations, and strategy, while helping shape the app’s trust, safety, and values work. I focus especially on teen online safety, human-generated content, participatory design, and healthier relationships with technology. I am a postdoctoral alum of Vanderbilt University’s Department of Computer Science, where I worked with Dr. Pam Wisniewski’s Socio-Technical Interaction Research Lab. I continue to write, speak, and research at the intersection of online safety, digital trust, decentralized technology, and youth wellbeing. I was named a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for Data Integrity in 2023. In 2025, I had the honor of serving as President of Division 13 of the American Psychological Association, the Society of Consulting Psychology. I also live with major depressive disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. In 2020, I took a leave from PwC to focus on my mental wellness, and I now speak and write openly about mental health, especially in the workplace and in relation to digital wellbeing. This blog, Seriously Jerk Brain, chronicles much of that journey.

1 Comment

  1. Yes! Cooking is a great creative outlet. I have no interest in restaurant food at the moment. OTOH, I can’t wait to meet you for lunch soon!

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