Minnesota's Amy Thielen celebrates art of cooking for 'Company' in new cookbook

In Minnesota, summer is fleeting. It's even shorter, and more precious, in lake country, where roads hug shorelines, unfurling like spools of black and yellow ribbon.

Beyond the charm of downtown Park Rapids, in the even smaller Two Inlets Township, is where cookbook author Amy Thielen lives with her husband, sculptor Aaron Spangler, their son, Hank, and a regal canine named Hilly.

It's a Saturday, an ideal night for a dinner party, according to Thielen. "I wake up on Saturday morning with only a vague idea ... and a blank index card and sit down with a cup of coffee to sketch a menu," she writes in her new cookbook, "Company: The Radically Casual Art of Cooking for Others."

Thielen is now the author of three books. "The New Midwestern Table," published in 2013, won a James Beard Award and has become a standard-bearer for the cuisine of the North. A memoir, "Give a Girl a Knife" (2018), chronicled her time in New York City's professional kitchens, before she and Spangler moved back to Minnesota, where they converted a cabin into a home. And "Company," out this week, is an ode to Minnesota holiday gatherings, like Thanksgiving, deer camp or casual Saturday night settings like this.

The closer we are to our destination, the fewer signs of life there are. Houses give way to cabins, which eventually give way to a bait shop/gas station and the wilderness. The hum of asphalt abruptly switches to the crunch of gravel. As we inch along the thin pass, daisies nod a greeting and there's a tractor stopped on a steep incline into the ditch. In the city it'd count as antique, but up here it's just real old.

The path twists around an outbuilding, and Thielen's front porch comes into view. It's the setting for her recipes and plenty of dinner parties, which has a simpler meaning to Thielen: "You go to someone's house, check out their garden, their pets and their projects, eat all their food, drink their homemade alcohol, and toddle off into the night holding a jar of canned pickles."

Before greetings can be exchanged, we've first got to run this past Hilly, who alerts every new guest with her throaty bark. She is particular about the company she keeps and luckily, we're accepted with a sniff and a full-body shake. Plumes of undercoat float and blow away like a dandelion puff; the hairs linger for days.

We amble inside, hang coats, make the stilted first conversation of friends who haven't seen each other for years.

A bottle of wine slides from its paper husk into a tub filled with ice and water. We wander out to the garden to take stock of the harvest. Thielen is particularly proud of her cabbages, a rare conical-shaped variety. Tomatoes are so filled with juice and sun that they dangle off the vines.

There was every intention to cook from her new book, which was splayed on her massive kitchen counter. Flitting between it and the stove, she began to cook. But just as she describes, "A casual home-cooked meal is unkempt, and hard to capture in a single frame," as the best intentions unravel. Soon, soft evening light stretched out atop the tree line.

Aromas burbled from the pots and pans Thielen was tending. As dishes coalesced, we went into the shed to collect an artist to feed. "Let's go see if Bruce is still here," she said.

Even though we'd been chatting for hours, there had been no indication that anyone else was around. From the outside, the studio appears to be a large garage, but inside the air is perfumed with wood dust, cigars and big ideas.

"Bruce?" Amy called out to no answer. We stepped through the debris from Spangler's work — soaring, knobby sculptures that almost moved with the change of light, all in various stages of existence. In a back room, next to a loom that took up half the space, was textile artist Bruce Engebretson. Rapt within his work, his easy smile only appeared once we were standing almost at his side.

Engebretson bubbles with stories that have nothing to do with casual dinner side chats. He tries to beg off from dinner, but he and his stories must stay for this feast. Someone has to call his husband and woo him to join us for dinner — Engebretson's steadfast refusal to carry a phone is another tale to hear, but we don't get to that.

Soon Thielen's son arrives home, and Spangler appears. A chicken breast sizzles in the black cast iron pan. Thielen tucks it in with parchment paper that crunches in protest against her hand.

After the garden-fresh lima beans are popped out of their jackets, the wine is liberated from its tub and the cabbage has been rendered from conical to tender bits, we're ready to decamp to the side porch, where a long table is laid out with cloth and candles are lit.

Night has enveloped the house, drawing us all closer to the food — and to each other. Thielen tips the serving platter, encouraging us to dip a serving spoon in the juices. A mortar and pestle is hefted around, containing a verdant jumble of fresh herbs and anchovies that serve as an everything sauce. The garden produce is prepared mostly from the book — although not all the way. Sometimes improvisation is better when there's good conversation.

By the time Engebretson's husband finally arrives, we're settling in for ice cream ladled with jam Thielen made from red currants and strawberries, which tastes like summer sun caught in a pint jar.

"A meal with friends or family is nothing more, and nothing less, than a fleeting event that fills a momentary spiritual need," Thielen writes. At that long table we talked intimately about loss and new beginnings, the food and the weather, until our full bellies made our eyelids heavy.

Earlier that evening we'd talked only a bit about her book, about how "Company" was supposed to come before the pandemic. How it had to change and shed expectations before these tales and recipes could be stitched together again.

Sometimes you just have to wait until the time is right, like when a tomato is ready to pull from the vine.

Serves 6 to 8.

Like so many height-of-summer dishes, this salad lives and dies on the quality of the melon, which should be soft and scoopable and highly aromatic. A vine-ripened melon will be heavy in the hand, full of juice. When you turn it over to sniff its bottom, it should smell sweet and faintly musky-heady like incense, not sour like fortified wine. In my experience, local farm stands sell the most consistently luscious melon although you can get lucky at a grocery store.

Keeping things simple, I marinate a few handfuls of cherry tomatoes and ground cherries until they cough up their juices, then spoon them over the glistening hills of melon. To scoop the melon into egg-shaped "quenelles," drag a serving spoon through the soft flesh, rolling it into an oval: Visualize ice cream. When the salad is gone, save the juices to pour over tomorrow's summer salad. From "Company" by Amy Thielen (W.W. Norton, 2023).

• 5 oz. yellow cherry tomatoes (about 1 c.), halved

• 3/4 c. husked ground cherries (small gold tomatillos), halved

• 1/8 tsp. fine sea salt, plus more for the melon

• Freshly ground black pepper

• Large pinch of sugar

• 1 1/2 tbsp. fresh lemon juice

• 3 tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for garnish

• 1/2 large ripe muskmelon (about 2 1/2 lb.)

• 1 small ball (4 oz.) fresh mozzarella, preferably sold in brine

• A handful of small fresh basil leaves, for garnish

Directions

Combine the cherry tomatoes and ground cherries in a small bowl and season with the salt, pepper to taste, sugar, lemon juice and olive oil. Toss and leave to macerate on the counter for at least 15 minutes.

Halve the muskmelon and scoop out the seed cavity. With a large oval serving spoon (I've found that a vintage spoon with thin edges and a pointed tip works best for this), scoop out the melon into oval quenelles: Tipping up the melon and pointing your spoon toward the center, scoop out the flesh, dragging it until it rolls into an egg shape.

Arrange the melon on a serving platter that's large enough to accommodate it in one layer. Season lightly with salt, to get its juices running. Tear the mozzarella into rough pieces and tuck them in among the melon quenelles. Spoon the cherry tomato mixture over the melon and garnish with small basil leaves.

Serve within 3 hours, at room temperature.

Serves 6 as a main dish, 10 as a side.

Whether shopping in your own garden or your neighbor's, or at a farmers' market, look for small vegetables for this. You want baby eggplant, either long Asian-​style or smaller Italian globes, picked when the skin is still shiny and the interior seeds are still small. Skinny Italian frying peppers. Sweet garden onions with the green tops still attached. Thin-​skinned cherry tomatoes and zucchini picked well before they explode. I'd avoid those tiny, bland "baby zucchini" — in my experience, zucchini doesn't develop any personality until adolescence.

Don't let the amount of olive oil scare you off; you can skim it off where it pools at the edges if it feels like too much, but it will function as a preservative if you make this in advance, or store leftovers in the fridge. It keeps for at least a week, getting better by the day. From "Company" by Amy Thielen (W.W. Norton, 2023).

• 2 medium globe or 3 Asian-​type eggplants (1 lb.)

• 2 medium zucchini (about 14 oz.)

• 5 sweet or semi-​hot frying peppers (about 6 oz.)

• 2 spring onions, greens trimmed

• 3/4 c. extra-​virgin olive oil

• 1/2 tsp. fine sea salt, plus more for the initial vegetable cooking

• Freshly ground black pepper

• 4 cloves garlic, sliced

• 1 ½ tsp. minced fresh rosemary

• 1 pint cherry tomatoes

• 2 tbsp. water

• 1 tbsp. honey

• 3 bay leaves

• 2 cinnamon sticks

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

If the eggplants are the globe type, cut them into quarters and then again into eighths; if they're the long Asian type, halve lengthwise and then cut crosswise into long bats. Cut the zucchini lengthwise into quarters. Halve the peppers and quarter the onions.

Heat an extra-​large ovenproof sauté pan over medium-​high heat, then add a thin layer of the olive oil. Quickly brown the surfaces of the vegetables in batches (they'll cook to tenderness later), seasoning them with salt and pepper just before putting them in the hot pan: first the eggplant, then the zucchini and the peppers, and then the onions. Don't crowd them, or they'll steam instead of sauté, and add a bit more oil if needed. Transfer the browned vegetables to a sheet tray.

Add the remaining olive oil, garlic and rosemary to the pan and cook briefly, just to take the bite out of the garlic, then add all of the sauteéd vegetables, nestling them into a nice formation, and drop the cherry tomatoes over the top. Season the vegetables with the 1/2 teaspoon salt and pepper to taste, then stir together the water and honey in a small dish and drizzle it over the vegetables. Tuck in the bay leaves and cinnamon sticks and bring everything to a simmer. Cook the vegetables until juices begin to accumulate, about 5 minutes, then tip the pan and baste the vegetables with a large spoon.

Cover the surface of the vegetables with a circular lid of parchment paper cut to fit the diameter of the pan, to trap in the flavor and moisture. Transfer the vegetables to the oven and bake for 30 minutes, stopping halfway through to baste the vegetables again. Remove the paper cover, baste the vegetables with the juices again, and bake, uncovered, for another 10 to 15 minutes, until the liquid clings to the vegetables and the exposed surfaces begin to burnish.

Remove from the oven and let settle and cool before serving, right from the pan.