I heart Give a Girl a Knife. Maybe it's because I'm from the Midwest and love cooking but I loved Amy Thielen's memoir and her journey to New York's high-end restaurants. I would read this again.

I’ve read my fair share of food memoirs and this one definitely falls in the top ten. I loved this because food had a hand in every part of the book, yet it didn’t just take place in a kitchen. I loved learning about their life in a cabin with no electricity and how she made her food dreams a reality. So good!

I really enjoyed this book as could relate to her highs and lows as my daughter was a chef. The book is an inspiring read for future culinaries and foodies.

Interesting read - it's always fascinating to get an inside look at the fine dining business.

Much like Kitchen Confidential, Amy Thielen delivers an inside look at life inside the world of New York fine-dining. The difference being the perspective shift from a female’s point of view and her story of learning to cook in an off-the-grid cabin deep in the woods of Minnesota. The New York life was interesting, but I would have preferred more of her time developing her cooking skills when she had to pump her own water, didn’t have electricity, and grew most of everything that she cooked.

While I found this memoir of her early adulthood which was split between an "off the grid" cabin in the Minnesota woods and cooking in Manhattan, I found it over-long. And as I was unaware of her later fame on TV and James Beard Award winning cookbook, it wasn't clear why I would care about this young woman who clearly loved food and had an interesting backstory. She writes well and the details are fascinating. The book starts with her cooking at high end restaurants in NYC and then goes back to her days in the remote cabin. The details are fascinating, but a bit redundant. Despite the length, the author revealed surprisingly little about herself. Even her beloved Aaron is not described in depth. Her story is fascinating for the details of life in rural Minnesota and life in the back woods, and the kitchen memoir reveals a woman fascinated by food, but overall had she not achieved future fame, I'm not sure this would have been published. Interesting, if overly long read.

This not your usual celebrity chef memoir. Instead Ms. Thielen describes surviving in NYC with equal enthusiasm as surviving life on a remote homestead in Minnesota. While some people starting out their careers seem to be fixated on the stresses of daily life and defeated by failure, the author managed to approach obstacles with a mature perspective. I liked how resilient she was and that she kept the bigger picture throughout her journey. My only quibble is that there were no recipes.

I love reading food memoirs and living vicariously through chefs who I admire and learning about the inner workings of restaurant kitchens! This book has two sections, one about the author's time as a line chef in New York and the other, which I found equally interesting is about her early connections to food as a child and then in her present home in Minnesota. If you like food, and who doesn't, I think you will enjoy this memoir!

I savored the description of food, although most of it had to do with the high end restaurants of NYC. Yes, I did relish getting a bird's eye view of the inner workings of elite restaurants. However, I wanted to know more about how her husband stayed loyal to her, despite the negative description she gave of herself as a partner. I also got lost in the back and forth between her early days in the country and her move back. I was not sure which version of herself she was describing at one point.For all its intensity, it lacked depth, lacked character development. It shimmered but for me, I felt like an essential ingredient was missing.

What a fantastic food memoir! I loved every page of this delectable dive into Theilen's journey as she navigated the world of cooking starting in the middle of nowhere and landing in the midst of one of the busiest cities in the world then retreating once more to the rural life where she began. What runs through this book is her true, genuine love of the craft of preparing and discovering food and flavors and memorable dishes. She's a brilliant writer, able to make images and sensations immediately accessible and memorable. If you are a food lover this should be a must add to your TBR pile.

I completely loved this book. Along the lines of Ruth Reichl and other foodie books, Amy has mastered the art of descriptive writing. I read sentences aloud to my husband because the details were making my mouth water.

This isn't just a book about cooking and food, it is about her life and the interesting ways in which she lives. Not many people, let alone ones with a passion for cooking, would be able to live off the grid and still be content and thrive.

This was so good and I didn't want it to end.

Fun story - very relatable for this mid-western girl. It was a pleasure to read.

Sometimes I feel like the Midwest doesn't get much love from those who aren't here. We're not New York. We're not L.A. We have no oceans. But we do have a lot of heart. And that's one of things I love about chef Amy Thielen's memoir, Give a Girl a Knife. 

First, let's get cheffy. Amy Thielen may be from Minnesota, but she kicked around in Manhattan's top kitchens for seven years, earning her stripes under David Bouley, Daniel Boulud and Jean-Georges Vongerichten, considered some of the best European chefs in America. A year or two in any of those kitchens can open just about any door in the world of cuisine. Listening to the stories of working their lines makes my foodie book brain so happy. I do love a good memoir about working in kitchens. And Amy Thielen's book is really good. 

Each chef has their own way of approaching food. Amy's is through color. She sees the colors on the plate and builds flavors and textures from there. I so loved hearing about how she sees food, how she layers the flavors, how she experiences her time in a kitchen. Reading her take on cooking forces me to think of food differently, to see possibilities, to see the artistry. 

And as amazing as that part of the memoir is, it's only half the story. 

The other half of Amy's story is that of growing up in the Midwest, of the Minnesota hot dish, of her mother teaching her how to wipe down a counter with a steaming hot towel or buttering toast so thoroughly that the melted butter drips onto your chin and down your arm. She talks about the time she and her then boyfriend (now her husband) lived in a tiny handmade cabin with no running water or electricity for three years, so he could concentrate on his art. Amy spent that time growing vegetables, learning to cook with what she had, canning and pickling, tasting, testing, experimenting. She spent her free time voraciously reading cookbooks from the previous generations of Midwestern mothers cooking for their family, discovering native flavors and drawing them out, living close to the land, eating farm to table decades or even centuries before it became a popular restaurant affectation. 

Amy's cooking now, her cookbook The New Midwestern Table, and her television show Heartland Table, come out of both of these traditions. She cooks with the skill and precision of an expertly trained New York chef as well as the heart of a Midwesterner who understands the land and its offerings. And just like her recipes, where she takes her favorite Minnesota ingredients and elevates them to culinary perfection, Give a Girl a Knife takes the Minnesota girl and infuses her with the confidence and prowess of a Manhattan chef, making this memoir the perfect combination of high end restaurant and down home soul. 

It feels like we Midwesterners finally get the book we deserve. And I don't care what part of the country you're in, you should definitely read this book immediately. 



Galleys for Give a Girl a Knife were provided by the publisher through NetGalley.com, with many thanks.

Living in suburbia, you are bound to come across a food tv show or two. Thus why I was excited to check out, Amy Thielen’s coming of age memoir. I am not a big foodie, but a enjoy a good meal, and I love a good sip of tea (i.e. gossip) Give a Girl a Knife follows Thielan’s path from a backwoods kitchen in the woods to New York’s finest kitchens.
Everyone knows if you can’t stand the heat to stay out of the kitchen, but have no fear as this memoir is not a sizzling satire on kitchen life. The tone leans to the dry side as are the anecdotes.
Long soliloquies on the intricacies of various vegetables and food prep are boring and add little to the joy of cooking or eating. If you’re looking for tips to your next foray into the kitchen, you will be hard pressed to find any.
What I enjoy about memoirs are the insights into a life I know nothing. Sadly, I didn't gain much from this reading. I do not feel like I have learned anything about high-end restaurant kitchens nor anything substantial about Thielen. For a woman with an interesting route to chefdom, it provides little insight into her thoughts on how women deal with the intricacies of working within the male-dominated world of upscale kitchens. Thielen's style is morose and plodding and the lack of excitement about food, her job, or life in general, make this a bland and boring read.
Give a Girl a Knife lacks excitement and spice.

Wonderful food memoir of Amy Thielen's move from the Midwest to working in some of the best kitchen's in New York City. Charming, funny memoir well worth reading.

Amy Thielen, host of the Food Network's Heartland Table, is a girl of two worlds - the ultra-high-end, gourmet restaurant kitchens of New York City, one of the world's most competitive restaurant environments; and her folksy home of rural Minnesota, where she honed her cooking skills and "taste memories" drawing on her parents' French-Canadian, German, and Eastern European immigration backgrounds and kitchen tips.

I love a good fish-out-of-water memoir, or in this case a fish who jumps back and forth between two ponds because it's not really sure anymore which one belongs it in. That's the dilemma Thielen grapples with for many years - which life does she really want? The quiet one in a primitive, back to basics house in the woods hand-built by her husband, artist and sculptor Aaron Spangler, harvesting their vegetable garden and pumping pure water by hand; or the one in vibrant, multicultural Brooklyn, including working 80-hour weeks cooking in the city's top kitchens, exhausted and underpaid but fulfilled?

After determining the Big Apple is the best place for them both and their nascent careers; hers in professional cooking and his in visual art, the couple leaves their shared hometown of Park Rapids, Minnesota for a Fort Greene, Brooklyn sublet. The journey lasts the next seven years, as Amy and Aaron spend part of the year working to the bone in New York, then spending three summer months in their woodsy home in rural Minnesota. They get their experience, they grow and learn, and eventually they have to decide in which ground to finally put down roots.

Thielen tells stories of her evolution as a cook, looping in her childhood, colorful family, and combination of luck and undeniably hard grunt work in kitchens. She makes a career by fusing her two loves, haute cuisine and down-home, Plains-state traditionalism. The heartiness of earthy Midwestern food combined with international culinary culture, like that of Danube, the high end kitchen where she begins her career as an intern attending cooking school, contrast strikingly with the kitchen where she explores her familial roots in the summertime, somehow managing to thrive as a cook in a facility without electric or running water.

In New York, Amy works in the restaurants of renowned fine chefs David Bouley, Daniel Boulud, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten, cooking foods that I can't even imagine eating, let alone preparing. Here, she describes gröstl, a common thrown together, fried-up leftovers dish in Austria, as prepared in Danube, an Austrian-influenced, uber-fancy Manhattan restaurant: "Gröstl, the Austrian term for the mixed bag of leftovers Tyrolean grandmothers might fry up in a cast-iron pan for skiers returning home from the mountain, otherwise known as hash. Our gröstl was made with a lobster claw, a pad of seared foie gras, and some tissue-thin veal tortellini - you know, just some scraps from the kitchen."

She takes every step and surprise as part of the learning process, both professionally and personally. She allows memories of her childhood and foundational connections to food, cooking, and feeding others to rush back as she experiments. It was a fascinating, nostalgic process, even reading it secondhand. She and her husband, in their restlessness, become "exiles who pine for difficult pasts," as she puts it.

This is another in my recent kick of "foodoirs" (food memoirs) and I'm late to the party - just doing some light research about this one, I saw it's the latest in a long line of tales from the fiercely competitive, high pressure gourmet kitchens of New York. Those chapters were absolutely my favorites here - Thielen has a knack for capturing quick but evocative sketches of the characters she worked with and for, and for making the high-energy kitchens come alive on the page.

Her background makes this unique - she's forever tied to the flavors of her Midwestern youth, both quite literally in her cooking preferences and emotionally. Her recollections of American pantry staples are kind of delightful, and at least for me, completely evocative: "Onion soup mix, with its telltale rattlesnake shake and its burned-sugar-and-soy tang, possessed the power to reach through the decades and jolt all my dead memories alive." I love finding others who also appreciate the apparently underrated Lipton onion soup mix.
And she employs a thoughtfulness as she recalls early community aspects of her relationship to food. That's a big topic here; how food is distributed and shared in a community, strengthening those bonds through our shared needs and dishes prepared "with love":

Later I would roll my eyes at the [ice cream] buckets, because I couldn't see these milky, repurposed, plastic gallon containers for what they really were: a symbol of the whole community's eating, a marker of generosity and thrift at the same time. In any other place, these ideas of abundance and frugality would sit at odds with each other, but in the Midwest of my youth they were bosom buddies...The irony is this: Many of the traditional Midwestern favorites require a lot of time and effort to make but no one would ever want to say so. A neighbor lady might make potato salad by the gallon, spending an hour dicing potatoes into baby-bite-size cubes, but then, with consummate modesty, as if to say "No big deal," she would carry it around in some junky, old reused plastic tub.

The excitement of the writing waned in the sections detailing life off the grid in the forest. As passionate as she is about this pioneer style of living, and committed to the difficulties of it (which I wholly appreciate and was impressed by) the story lacked momentum, it just slowed - like the days there were slower.

It's an interesting, engaging read, sure to appeal to foodoir (sorry, I love that word now) lovers like me, even if also like me you're a completely amateur cook (no recipes here) and not even particularly interested in the high-end kitchen world. I loved the juxtaposition between her two worlds, and how she maintained a positive, upbeat attitude in her transitioning between them. She also displays a healthy ability for introspection, for admitting failure and mistakes and learning from them, something I always appreciate in memoirs.

The timeline of the narrative was a bit off, resulting in the same stories being told multiple times, such as the initial decision to move to New York and traveling there. It felt like deja vu. She returns often to the same scenarios and situations, looped in a very roundabout way through the narrative. It's confusing. It also includes a superfluous amount of details that detract from the overall story and feel too personal, odd as that surely sounds for a memoir. There were indulgent, personal details that didn't contribute meaningfully to the plot or story, and I'm always frustrated when an editor lets that slip.

But it's entertaining and sure to be meaningful to anyone who's felt torn between places, cultures, past and present.

Interesting memoir of working in NYC restaurants and staying connected to small town Minnesota roots; but the version I read had a confusing structure which made it challenging to follow the storyline

Great book. I enjoyed Amy's show when it was on the Food Network and I really like her Midwestern Roots cookbook. This autobiography follows Amy's career through the kitchens of New York and back to her roots. I hope for more from her in the future.

I enjoyed reading this book but I thought there would be some recipes included - which made me read the book in the first place. It was well written and had some humor in it as well as serious sections.