After my sage plant struggled for years in a shadowy corner of my roof-deck planter garden, I moved it into the sunniest spot up there. Boy did that make a difference. It also meant I needed to figure out what to do with all the leaves it produced. As luck would have it, I was also trying out AI cooking platforms. That night, I plugged the prompt “recipe using brats and lots of sage” into an AI recipe generator and it gave me what it called “sage infused brats skillet with caramelized onions.” Ooh, that sounds nice, I thought. The platform I prompted is called DishGen, one of the few services that specializes in AI cooking. It takes recipes from large language models like OpenAI and Anthropic and repackages them into more kitchen-friendly formats. It also gives users the ability to create meal plans. (Other tools, like ChefGPT and Epicure, offer similar features.) DishGen's sage-and-sausage recipe used only 2 tablespoons of sage, not exactly lots, but I picked my way through the steps and emerged with a pleasant-enough Tuesday dinner. I also needed to use a fair amount of my own kitchen experience to get it across the finish line. For example, the ingredients called for a “large yellow onion, thinly sliced.” Shall we peel it? Cut in half before we slice it? Pole-to-pole or through the equator? And how thin is thin? It didn't say. People who like cooking from well-written recipes would find this frustrating. The recipe also calls for “2 tablespoons fresh sage leaves, chopped,” which comma lovers will appreciate, is confusing. Do you fold up those sage leaves and smash them into your tablespoon, then chop them? (It's clearer to call for the desired quantity of “chopped fresh sage leaves.”) Once I started cooking, the butter and sliced onions went into a skillet to “cook slowly until caramelized, about 12 minutes,” and oh man, so many things. Are they just not feeling the stirring? What about some descriptions of things to watch for along the way so we know we're doing it right? I also noted at that point that it really wasn't much onion considering the recipe is for four people. My wife Elisabeth picked up on this right away when I set it down. “Is that all of it, or is there more,” she asked. “It just looks like a little blob.” In all my years of food, cookbook, and recipe writing, I can say with confidence that when testing a recipe from a new source, the chance that I happened to pick out the only bad apple in the bunch on my first try is witheringly small. When I looked for sage-heavy recipes in The New York Times Cooking section (which is also an app), one of the results was for Samin Nosrat's fried sage salsa verde. Did you notice how your ears perked up there? Maybe you even did a bit of involuntary salivating?