Thanks to everyone who came out to the recipe writing class at Whole Foods last night! We had a packed room, and, thanks to our wonderful line-up of speakers — Ann Clark, Karen Morgan, Michael Chu and Elizabeth Engelhardt — we were able to cover a lot of ground about the history of community cookbooks, testing recipes, recipe style and more.

We’ve launched the recipe submission form, which also has a place to upload a photo [SUBMISSIONS ARE NOW CLOSED], and we’ll be accepting recipes through the end of the month. It’s a relatively short window of time, but our goal is to send the final book to the publisher by September 1 in order to have it ready by the holidays.

All Austin Food Blogger Alliance members who have been accepted through the end of the month are invited to contribute, and here are a few guidelines to help you with the submission process.

Recipes

You are allowed to submit up to two recipes, to allow for duplicates of similar recipes. We prefer original recipes—this is your time to shine! Adapted recipes will be accepted as long as you have made at least three significant changes to the recipe and give credit to the original creator.

For formatting, we’ll follow the guidelines in “The Recipe Writer’s Handbook“, an excellent resource for recipe writing and testing.

• Ingredients should be listed in the order they are used and called for in the directions.
• Double check to make sure that all the ingredients are mentioned in the directions, and vice versa.
• Do not use abbreviations for the quantity.
• Generic names are preferred over brand names, unless absolutely necessary.
• As much as we like the metric system, especially for baking, please submit in U.S. measurements
and, if needed for accuracy, add metric in parentheses.

Please test your dish by cooking it at least twice, once to nail down the recipe and again to make sure it works the way you want it to. (And to make sure you have a nice photo of it.) We’ll be retesting recipes as needed. Please understand that we may not be able to publish every recipe that is submitted.

Photos

When you submit your recipe, you may also submit a photo.
• Please send high-resolution photos at 300 dpi, with a total size of at least 1 MB.
• Make sure your photos are not blurry!
• We prefer photos taken without flash.

You may collaborate with a photographer other than yourself to take photos of your dish, but in these cases, we will need you to provide the contact information for the photographer so we can obtain their written permission to publish their photo(s). All photos taken by someone other than the blogger will be given photo credit anywhere that we publish them.

Please note that we might not be able to use all submitted photos—depending on the number of high quality photos we get, we might have to reshoot some of the dishes. If you have more than one photo for a dish, you can email extras to afbacookbook@gmail.com.

Later this year you will have the opportunity to submit photos that exemplify Austin, AFBA, or the Austin food scene.

Blogger bio

Members are as much of this cookbook as are the recipes, so please submit a short bio of yourself when you submit your recipe. We want to know who you are; who you cook for; why or what you blog about; why you love cooking; what makes you, your cooking or your kitchen unique, etc.

Headnote

This is another word for an introduction to a recipe. It explains the who, what, why, when and how of a specific dish. Share what inspired you, why you picked the dish, and/or any tricks that people who cook it would want to know.

Please keep in mind that recipes, bios, and headnotes might be edited for grammar and consistency, but it is our goal to keep your voice in place so you can be fully represented within the cookbook.

We are hoping to have a cookbook with approximately 100 recipes in a variety of categories, from drinks and appetizers to dessert. Feel free to use our members-only Facebook group to throw out ideas and ask questions of one another and the board if you’re not sure about which recipe to submit or if you have a question when you’re ironing out the details of your recipe.

This is a learning process for all of us, and there’s no such thing as a perfect recipe or a perfect cookbook. Thanks for your patience along the way!

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The Austin Food Blogger Alliance is putting out a cookbook.

Yes, it’s an ambitious project for a group that just celebrated its first birthday, but in honor of the longstanding tradition of community cookbooks, we’re turning to members for the recipes, photos, design, editing and testing of the book, which we hope to release at the end of the year.

For generations, community cookbooks have been not only a source of inspiration in the kitchen, they’ve also been a cultural record of the cooks that make up that community.

In addition to recipes, we’ll be asking members to write a little about themselves, their blog, who they cook for and why. We want this book to be a reflection of Austin in 2012, and we won’t be able to make it happen without you.

The first step is collecting the recipes, which we’ll be doing throughout the month of April.

To help all of us write better recipes, we’re hosting a Recipe Writing 101 class at 7 p.m. on April 3 in a conference room on the Plaza Level at Whole Foods Market global offices, above the store at Sixth Street and Lamar Boulevard. Guests can access the Plaza level via the elevators marked “office” from P1 or P2 parking levels, or via the staircase from the surface parking lot, and through the double glass doors.

Food writers Karen Morgan (founder of Blackbird-bakery.com and author of “Blackbird Bakery Gluten-Free“), Ann Clark (author of  ”Quick Cuisine” and “Ann Clark’s Fabulous Fish,” and founder of Austin’s first cooking school), and Michael Chu (of the award-winning blog, Cooking For Engineers) will walk us through some of the pitfalls that beginning recipe writers often fall into and help navigate some of the more nuanced steps of creating recipes that are clear, concise and easy to follow.

Elizabeth Engelhardt, author of “Republic of Barbecue,” and an American history and women’s studies professor at the University of Texas who specializes in foodways, will kick off the class with brief history of community cookbooks and a reminder of why they still matter today.

The class is free to members and $15 for non-members, who can sign up and pay via EventBrite.

Look for another post next week with a link to the recipe submission page, but start thinking about which recipes you’d like to contribute. Email Addie Broyles if you have questions about the project, broylesa@gmail.com.

-Addie Broyles, Feminist Kitchen

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