Recipe Column Cards

A Chrome extension from Jen Built It

Print any recipe as one engineered grid card

I read 50+ books a year, but recipe instructions won't stay in my head. I'd reread the same step over and over at the stove, and it drove me up a wall. Then I saw this grid format and fell in love: every ingredient lined up with its step, the whole recipe in one view. I had to have it, so I built it. Now any recipe can print like this.

3 free prints a month. No account, no email.

I read the page. You get the card.

This is the card
Lemon Butter Pasta with Peas
Serves 4 · Prep 5 min · Cook 15 min · Total 20 min
The engineered grid formatPrinted with Recipe Column Cards

How it works

Three clicks between a recipe page and your binder

No copy-paste, no reformatting, no account. The extension only wakes up when you click it.

1. Open any recipe page

Works on the big recipe sites and on independent food blogs, anywhere the recipe is published as standard recipe data.

2. Click the card button

It reads the ingredients and steps, then builds the grid: every ingredient lined up with the step that uses it.

3. Print it

One card, sized to the page. Wide recipes flip to landscape on their own so nothing gets cut off.

The look

You'll love this format or you'll hate it

This is the engineered grid, the format where ingredients merge into steps like a flowchart. I cook from these every week. Before you install anything, you should know exactly what you're getting:

  • It doesn't work everywhere. Roughly 1 site in 10 doesn't publish readable recipe data. You'll get a friendly heads-up instead of a card, and it costs you nothing.
  • Big recipes make big grids. A 10-step blondie recipe builds 9 step columns and prints landscape, like the one on the right. That IS the format doing its job.
  • It won't always look like a dainty index card. If you want a cute two-column printable, plenty of tools do that. This one is for people whose brains read recipes as flowcharts.
A wide engineered grid card for an espresso brown butter blondie recipe with nine step columns
A real card straight out of the builder: 9 step columns. Complicated recipe, complicated card, and that's the point.

Pricing

Free to try, cheap to keep

Start free with no account. Go Pro when you're printing more than a few cards a month.

Free

$0

forever

  • 3 grid card prints a month
  • No account, no email
  • Small footer line on the card
Add to Chrome
Best deal, about $1.58 a month

Pro

$19 / year

or $2.99 month to month

  • Unlimited prints
  • Recipe box: every card saved, searchable, reprintable
  • Custom card colors
  • No footer line on prints
Go Pro

FAQ

Questions I actually get

Which sites does it work on?

Any page that publishes standard recipe data (schema.org Recipe), which covers the big recipe sites and the large majority of food blogs. Roughly 1 in 10 pages doesn't publish it; on those you'll see a friendly "couldn't find a recipe" and no print gets used up.

What is an engineered grid card?

A table where ingredients run down the left column and steps merge across to the right, so you can see which ingredients go into which step at a glance. The format has been around cooking forums for decades. It reads like a flowchart for the recipe.

Does my recipe data leave my computer?

The ingredients and steps of the recipe you're printing are sent to my card builder, which uses AI to map ingredients to steps, then the card comes back. Nothing else from the page is read, and there's no account or tracking in the extension.

Why did the same recipe print a slightly different card twice?

The ingredient-to-step mapping is AI-built, and it occasionally groups things differently between builds. Cards are saved after the first build, so reprints match, and a rebuild option for Pro is on the way.

Can I cancel Pro whenever?

Yes. Cancel any time and Pro runs through the period you paid for, then you drop back to the free 3 prints a month. Your printed cards are paper, they're yours forever.

Does this strip ads from the sites I print from?

No. The page stays exactly as the creator published it, ads and all. This only formats what you print for your own kitchen. I ran a recipe blog for years, so this one is personal.