One voice note, and mom got a private cooking course
My mom asked for a lima bean recipe. A little over an hour later she had a 12-page PDF, step by step, with realistic photos, and I only asked and replied.
Mom asks for a recipe, and you send her a link with twenty ads, and a video that pops up in the middle. Come on.
(Shluchim, singular shaliach, is Hebrew for “emissaries”. It’s what I call my AI agents.)
The ask:
My mom asked me for a lima bean recipe (she calls them “bobs”). And I have one from Eyal Shani that I really love. (Eyal Shani is an Israeli chef.)
I didn’t sit down to write anything. I just recorded Basher a voice note, exactly as it came out, with my mom sitting right next to me, so she’d hear how simple it is:
My mom asked me to write her a lima bean recipe like bobs, there’s a recipe I really loved from Eyal Shani. Look it up online and make me a PDF file with step by step in Hebrew what to do at each step, preferably also with pictures or real explanations, so that even someone who never cooked anything in their life will succeed at making the lima beans, Eyal Shani’s lima beans.
Not exactly poetry. But he understood exactly what I wanted.
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What turned up along the way:
Turns out it isn’t a stew in tomato sauce at all. It’s “lima mashbaha”. Beans that cook for three hours in the oven, in olive oil, garlic, sage and chili. The tomato gets squeezed on top only when you serve.
The source: Eyal Shani’s recipe on Yummies, Channel 13. And every amount or time that wasn’t in the source was marked in the file as a suggestion. Meaning nobody invented a recipe for Eyal Shani.
Ten minutes later:
A first PDF came out, 11 pages. A shopping list, a timeline, a guide to heat level, and a table of common mistakes.
Only one problem, the illustrations. Simple. Ugly, to put it mildly.
I wrote to him: “I want all the pictures realistic, not these ugly illustrations”. And this time I asked him to try Gemini (Google’s AI).
A short note: I have a Gemini Pro subscription. So I asked Basher to install Gemini’s command-line tool (CLI, it’s called agy), so we can run it through Grok Bot, and take the best of what it does.
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Gemini enters the picture:
Gemini made 11 realistic photos. And checked each one: hands, text, and that the beans really look like lima and not like chickpeas in costume.
One came out with garbled caption text, so he replaced it. On two, small flaws stayed, a pot in a different color and parsley that isn’t in the recipe. And instead of hiding it, he added an honest note in the PDF.
And I want to say this clearly: the pictures were made with AI, they are not photos of Eyal Shani’s dish.
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The result:
Final PDF, 12 pages, all the illustrations replaced with photos. I emailed it to my mom.
From the ask to the file, a little over an hour. And me? I asked and replied. That’s it.
It came out killer.
Okay, how do you ask for this:
Exactly like that. Record a voice note, say what you want in your own words, and ask that even someone who never cooked in their life will succeed.
And if the pictures aren’t good, say so without being shy. He doesn’t get offended.
Mom is happy. Now someone just has to cook. 🙂
Photos from the recipe:
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The pictures were made with AI.
The PDF itself is in Hebrew (same one mom got).