Amy Hanten is on a mission, and that mission is to get people back to the dinner table.
She plans to stop at nothing to make that happen, and she’ll use every tool in her arsenal to do that — salads, turkey taco bakes, even green and gold trifles to entice Green Bay Packers fans.
“We didn’t have any money (growing up), and when we did, there were not a lot of restaurants,” Hanten said during an appearance Thursday night at the Shawano-City County Library. “My mom, my dad, my great-grandmother, my sister and I would gather around the dinner table every single night for dinner.”
That sort of family gathering is becoming a lost concept in today’s technological world, Hanten said. She believes magic happens when families are eating together at night.
“It is so sad that many families never, ever eat together for dinner,” Hanten said. “They could be eating in the same house, at the same time, but not together. Dad’s watching the game, eating in front of the TV. Mom’s on Facebook, eating in front of the computer. Kids are in their rooms playing video games.”
Hanten does not consider herself to be a professional cook, just another mother who struggles at times to get her own family gathered as a unit at the dinner table. To that end, she shares recipes on television and in her new cookbook, “The Cooking Mom Cooks Up Memories.”
Hanten hosts the “Cooking With Amy” television show on WLUK in Green Bay. The show is going into its sixth season this month.
Hanten visited the local library in 2010 for her first-ever cooking demo right after her first book, “The Cooking Mom,” was published. The visit was memorable, Hanten said, recalling that she held up her trifle dish and asked the audience what they thought it was, and received the response that it was a really big margarita glass.
“Let me tell you, my life has really changed since then,” Hanten said. “Now I do (demos) all the time and all over the country.”
When Hanten first started at WLUK more than 20 years ago, she was a morning news anchor. Her producers asked what kind of fun segments she could do, and cooking immediately sprang to mind.
“I’ve always loved cooking. My grandmother was an amazing cook, and I’ve been cooking since I was a little girl,” Hanten said. “Both of my parents worked, so I was the one responsible for cooking. It was never a chore to make dinner for the whole family.”
Getting the family together every night is a tall order, even for Hanten, who travels across the country doing television appearances and other live demonstrations. However, setting up dinner at least once, possibly twice, each week is the key to keeping families in harmony.
“It makes a huge difference in my family’s life,” Hanten said. “I feel like I know what’s going on in my kids’ lives. They know what’s going in my life. Studies show that families that eat together, the children are doing better in school.”
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