Time to celebrate: The Austin Food Blogger Alliance Cookbook is here!

Almost exactly a year ago, the Austin Food Blogger Alliance announced that we were putting together a community cookbook.

We hosted a recipe writing class and gathered recipes, stories, vignettes and photos. We matched up bloggers to test one another’s recipes and hosted a potluck to taste the results and photograph some of the dishes.

Over the winter, we assembled all that wonderful content into a manuscript for The History Press and have been working quietly behind the scenes getting everything together so that we could finally announce that the Austin Food Blogger Alliance Cookbook is finally here!

I’ve had so much fun over the past year working on this book with members including Melissa Skorpil, who oversaw the photography in the book, lead copy editor Megan Myers, assistant project manager Lindsay Bailey, design consultant Shaun Martin, and editors Lee Stokes Hilton, Shefaly Ravula, Suzanna Cole and Meredith Bethune. Of course, they say it’s not really a book until you hate it at least once, which I admit happened a time or two over the course of the year, but all-in-all, this has been one of the most rewarding long-term projects I’ve ever had the pleasure of working on.

But the fun really starts now that the book has arrived!

On Tuesday, we’ll celebrate with cookbook contributors, AFBA members, pre-sale buyers and our cookbook sponsor, the Austin-based cooking app Cooking Planit, with a sold-out launch party at Freedmen’s, but mark your calendars for two upcoming events on April 24 and May 11.

At 3 p.m. Wednesday, April 24, AFBA will be hosting a cooking demonstration with member Elizabeth Van Huffel, who will show how to make her famous strawberry daiquiri, at the Sustainable Food Center Farmers’ Market at the Triangle, which will also be an opportunity to buy the book directly from us or pick up a copy if you have already purchased yours during the pre-sale campaign. (We’re also having a AFBA happy hour that night at the nearby Flying Saucer starting at 6 p.m.)

BookPeople has generously offered to host an official event for us there at 4 p.m. on Saturday, May 11. At that event, I’ll be chatting with AFBA past president Natanya Anderson, member Chris Perez and cookbook volunteers Melissa Skorpil and Megan Myers about the process of putting together the book and why we felt so compelled to create a community cookbook in the first place.

Later this summer, we have plans to teach cooking classes and host other cookbook-related events, so stay tuned for details about those. In the meantime, keep your eyes peeled for the book at local retailers including Breed & Co., BookPeople, Whole Foods and Central Market, and feel free to leave a review of the book (or buy a few extra copies!) on our Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com pages. You can see the full list of recipes here.

Thanks to everyone for your generous support in these past 12 months! Community cookbooks couldn’t happen without a community that believes in working together to make it happen, so I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your enthusiasm and encouragement. Hope to see you at some of these upcoming events, and if you have any questions about the book (or pre-sale book pick-ups or anything else about the book) feel free to leave them in the comments or email me at broylesa AT gmail DOT com.

— Addie Broyles, cookbook editor