If you’re the type of person who needs to refer back to their recipe multiple times throughout the cooking process, which is practically everyone, then you’ve probably had to deal with a fair amount of splattering on your pristine recipe pages. Keeping that cookbook or recipe card close to the stove can seem like a necessity when in the middle of preparing dinner, but it’s equally necessary to protect that recipe, or you might end up burying cooking steps in a gob of tomato sauce, never to be seen again.

Enter Ina Garten’s clear plastic sleeve hack. Granted, this primarily works only for printouts and recipe cards, but the idea can be extended to other mediums as well. So whenever you bring out your recipe — be it your grandmother’s handwritten instructions for gnocchi, that old “Joy of Cooking” copy, the printout of your colleague’s bibimbap, or the Tasting Table recipe you read directly from your tablet or phone — make sure to cover it in some type of transparent substance that can withstand hot, wet splats of tomato sauce or melted chocolate.