“I probably shouldn’t say this, because this is a cookbook and I’m supposed to be selling the culinary dream,” Amy Thielen writes in an introduction to her 2023 book “Company.”
“But when you’re having people over, the food doesn’t really matter. … No one else will ever care about the food as much as you and I do.”
Thielen, a trained restaurant chef, James Beard Award-winning cookbook author, memoirist and former Food Network host, is a student of Upper Midwest entertaining. Though she hesitates to use “the e-word,” for fear of sounding too formal…