Stressful to think about, exhausting to achieve and often terrifying. Will you be able to

please all your guests this Christmas¹?

Possibly you will have wangled a relative-free 'home alone' version of Christmas, or find

yourself stranded by yourself with no-one to share a traditional meal with.

Why are we Asking for these Recipes?

Whatever your circumstances, this is the time of year when food tends to be very

important, both in preparation and enjoyment. It is the time when we spoil both ourselves

and the people we 're going to share our table with.

So, to this end, we thought we might have a stab at helping each other along a little –

with a collection of recipes to recommend for the time of year. An important word of advice

though, these should be your own recipes – the sort your granny taught you to cook, that didn't come

from a recipe book – that miraculous concoction that you discovered by serendipity – when you'd run

out of a vital ingredient and had to invent something totally new on the spot.

How You can Join In

You can find an outline plan of how to write your recipe here: How to Write a Recipe

If you're very cunning you can pinch the GuideML for the headers and so on by following the

instructions at the end of that Entry². Of course, we are much more interested in the food than in the neat way you may use GuideML, so please feel free to write in Plain Text if you wish.

The best of these recipes will be taken into the Edited Guide, so if you've never had the

honour of being published before, this could be your chance. We hope that we have enough

interesting and inspiring recipes to feature a small collection, in the run up to Christmas itself.
If we work quickly.

Where to Send your Completed Recipe

There are two ways to get yourself started on this challenge – first write out your recipe

in the format suggested – and then if you are confident that your recipe is up to scratch,

submit it to straight to Peer Review. To be certain to be featured we will be expect Entries

of high standard – so you should expect to follow any suggested comments given by our

team of Scouts and reviewers, they will be on hand to help you through the process.

If you are less confident, or feel that it's not quite on par with what you intended – then

send it to the Edited Guide Writing Workshop. Here the reviewers will assist you more generally with the shape and

contents of your Entry so that it can be then sent forward to Peer Review.

Ideas and Suggestions

If you're stuck for an inspiration we are particularly interested in hearing about

• Food that is specific to your country or origins
• Simple but luxurious starters or soups
• Vegetarian main courses to impress
• Scrumptious puddings and desserts
• Supper dishes
• Party Food
• How to handle the left over turkey

but whatever it is, it must be yours to share.

Do please take part, this should be fun. We're looking forward to seeing your

contributions, as we build the Guide for our future readers.