What started out as a distraction from writing papers became something much more for Food Network cook Amy Thielen.

During a recent in-studio interview, Thielen chatted about her love of Midwestern cuisine, where she sees it going and what it's like to work with Lidia Bastianich.

After attending college at Macalester University in St. Paul, Thielen moved in with her boyfriend, now her husband, to a cabin in the great Midwestern woods. She grew a garden, which provided a number of ingredients for her midwestern dishes and drove the 20 miles into town if she needed anything else.

"I kind of immersed myself in the cooking of another era," she said. "I would often call my grandmother to ask her all these questions because she was a fountain of knowledge for how you fermented things or hand-ground poppy seeds or flour, any of that stuff, she knew it."

Anything that stuck was posted on her blog,Sourtooth, as a way to keep up her writing while sending her thoughts on cooking and life in Minnesota into the universe. After a visit from her father, Thielen said she realized she should become serious about being a chef.

"He just looked at me and he said, 'What are you doing?'" Thielen said. "Because it had been about two or three years since college, I was working at a diner, I had a degree that I was still paying loans on and he paid plenty, too. So I said, 'I think I need to cook and I want to go to cooking school.' So that's when I moved to New York City."

Thielen currently stars in her very own show "Heartland Table" on the Food Network channel. She recently released her new cookbook "The New Midwestern Table", where she was inspired by trips taken with her husband.

"My husband and I take a lot of road trips just for fun and to explore things and I was running across a lot of restaurants in smaller Midwestern cities that were doing some really cool things and they were also mining our cultural food heritage," Thielen said. "So it just became very overwhelming to me that there needed to be yet another book I'm not the first Midwestern book by any means but I wanted to give it a go by myself."

Thielen admitted Bastianich helped produce the Food Network show and even came to her cabin for a few days to test some ideas. 

"Never did I ever dream that Lidia Bastianich would be standing in my kitchen, coaching me about how to be on TV," Thielen said. "But you know what I really appreciate about her and her whole team is that they have a deep food knowledge and she cares about all the details in the same way that I do.  And when I was telling the producers about it, Lidia said, 'Oh yeah, of course.'"

With her cookbook, Thielen said she hopes people will be proud of the food they make and enjoy the process. 

"It's about making something that fills your hunger and fits the need of the moment, whether that's something really, really simple or if it's a really, really big meal that you eat for the rest of the week" she said. "I just hope people aren't afraid of cooking. It's OK to make mistakes you have to make them to get better. And mistakes can be good, too they can be edible."