The One Step That Saves Your Collected Online Recipes From Potential Disaster

Living in such a digital age, it's rare to see physical cookbooks being used for anything but collecting dust on a shelf. This may be for a variety of reasons aside from the virtually unlimited amount of recipes and cooking tips you can find online — for instance, hefty or niche cookbooks have a lot of recipes most people will never make. That said, relying solely on digital recipes can be risky because some may be deleted, your device may malfunction just when you need it to look up how to make the best spicy shrimp scampi, or your favorite food blog could decide to charge for their recipes via a paywall. The solution? A good ol' fashioned printer.

Yes, while some may find this process a bit archaic, printing out a paper copy of your favorite online recipes can save you from any manner of these disasters altogether. Not only that, but it can prevent you from collecting those dusty old cookbooks — you're essentially building your own, all with recipes you'll actually use.

It's easy to collect an entire library of meal ideas or lists of specific cultural recipes over time, in several different places. Your Pinterest board might be loaded with easy weeknight dinners for prepping (for which you can try using a weekly meal theme) or you may have bookmarked your favorite cocktail recipes in a folder on your browser. Wherever they're scattered, printing your favorite recipes and collecting them all together will make your time spent in the kitchen a little easier.

Some users on various online platforms have turned to this method for gathering recipes both new and old — even some passed down through generations. In the Reddit community r/Cooking, user takethecatbus made a post asking for ideas on how to collect all their favorite recipes in one place. "My family heirloom recipes are on index cards, plus I have recipes saved on Pinterest, plus I have cookbooks with fav recipes in them, plus I have recipes I found on google, plus ones saved on Reddit as posts or comments, and so on," they wrote. In reply, Reddit user TheHumanRavioli commented, "Any recipe I try and will want to make again gets printed out and filed away. I've had too many devices crash and apps stop working (not for recipes, just in general) that I only trust hard copies."

One perk of printing out recipes is the endless ways you can organize them. Rather than piling them up as you go, you can put them all in one folder or binder with labeled tabs noting the meal type, cuisine, or dietary restrictions, if necessary. You can also create totally separate folders with all the same type of cuisine or with a certain theme, a fun and convenient way to prepare for entertaining or if you're craving a certain flavor.

If you relate to the Reddit thread in r/Cooking and you have special custom or family heirloom recipes, you can always use sheet protectors in a hardcover binder to ensure that they stay intact and protected from any spills or stains. Toss in a few old family photos, even, and you have a scrapbook and cookbook all in one to cherish and pass down for years to come.