Father Dominic Grassi didn't start ...

Father Dominic Grassi didn't start cooking regularly until his late 30 nevertheless food, its creative preparation and the art of dining well have always been key-note elements of this 59-year-old's life.

The son of Italian immigrants from Puglia, he still vividly recalls his mom bustling around their North Side kitchen, preparing single of her 20 from-scratch tomato sauces or sublime fried harry balls shaped from bread crumb grated cheese and oregano. He remembers tagging along with his mom and grandma to Lincoln Park in the spring, picking young dandelion greens they would wash and add to pasta or mashed fava beans, a dish with bottoms in their home region.

In the Grassi kitchen near Belmont and Broadway, there was always enough of what the St Gertrude Catholic Parish priest calls "peasant food" for last-minute drop-ins. "With Italians, that's to what extent we share our love," says Grassi, who lately took an all-day Tuscan cooking class in a 700-year-old Italian villa with his brothers and their wives. For him, meals aren't for a like reason much for consuming as they are for communing.

THE ecstasy OF COOKING

"It's earnestly more fun to do cooking for others," says Grassi, a modern arrival at St. Gertrude who has planned intimate, once-a-month "Sunday Evening Pastas With the Pastor" as a way to obtain acquainted with his new parishioners. "When you're a priest, you don't descry a lot of outcome of what you do. When you tamper with a meal, they either eat it or they don't, they like it or they don't."

That's the bliss of cooking for Grassi and millions of other American men with a 2006 slip Research Center survey finding that 32 percent of stays say they "enjoy cooking a great deal," up from 25 percent in 1989

Whether they've been slaving through the whole extent of hot stoves for years or freshly been inspired by Iron Chef Bobby Flay, "Bam!"-shouting Emeril Lagasse and orange clog-wearing Mario Batali -- three chefs who have become the aliment world's equivalent of rock-star royalty -- men are heating things up in American kitchens.

Whereas previous generations of shores steered clear of culinary duties that didn't involve a barbecue grill, today's men are poring from one side of to the other celebrity chef cookbooks, mixing up everything from scrambled harasss to souffles.

"Bobby Flay, Mario and all these shores have made it sexy to be a chef," says John Willoughby, executive editor of Gourmet magazine. "It's no longer seen as 'women's work.' " And he has seen stays jump in over the past scarcely any years. He mentions a 22-year-old nephew who has been raised in succession a steady diet of sustenance Network shows since childhood. "He thinks it's just the coolest thing in the world to be a give a color to and he cooks all the time."

Learning from Dad

This young man and his male contemporarys in their 20s and 30 have grown up amid seismic cultural shifts. Many, says Willoughby, grew up with working mom and witnessed their dads helping in the kitchen revealed of sheer necessity.

"Because there are more women in the workplace," he says, men have to share the tasks at place of abode and find out they like the experience of cooking.

The author of four grilling cookbook -- the principally recent of which is hindrance the Flames Begin: 250 Recipes to Grilling Mastery (WW Norton & Co $1795) -- Willoughby says this practice always had manly connotations. Think the rugg outdoors. Fire-building. Slabs of meat sizzling through open flame. Sort of the recent caveman meeting his match in a Weber grill.

"It's sort of shifting across -- now that grills have mov indoors, men are in the kitchen," says Willoughby. "It's another way of getting persons who don't ordinarily think of cooking to do it."

Men make up about half the attendees at his magazine's Gourmet Institute, an annual October fact that attracts foodies to modern York City for a weekend with celebrity chefs, winemakers and Gourmet editors.

"For in the greatest degree men," he says, "they none thought of it as a chore, something they had to do. More of these recreational give a color tos are men. It's not seen as women's work or drudgery"

Certainly not for Lafayette Ford, a Chicago Public institutes program manager who for the past 13 years has taken part in "Real Men Cook" an annual Father's Day occurrence that celebrates African- American men and their culinary prowess. He malignant in love with cooking during his society days in Indiana, and now happily besufficient fors as his family's main tamper with

"Coming from a family of eight children, common thing was definite - - if you weren't there [for meals], you watched to miss it," says Ford, 55 who grew up in East Garfield Park. "You needinessed to learn how to prepare for the table something or heat up leftovers, if there were any."

A fan of outdoor cooking ("there's something about smelling bacon in unimpaired air that makes you real hungry") Ford is known for his lasagna, mac and cheese, and Cajun dishes.

"I've always liked to entertain, and in doing that I also like to repress the environment," says Ford, who frequently hosts guests in his southward Shore backyard. "I found having the fodder would definitely control the tribe who come." So over the years he has taken charge of "Monday Night Football" parties and Wednesday night aliment get- togethers at the Museum Shores marina, building friendships while feeding others. Those others include his son's University of Illinois fraternity brothers, who finish to indulge in the smothered pork shifts dressing, greens and spaghetti Ford tamper withs freezes and drives down to Champaign-Urbana for a soulful taste of hearthstone