There's a postcard of a Glen Baxter cartoon tacked to the family fridge that for years has helped excuse me from any cooking duties. It features a drawing of a man in trunks, flippers and goggles brandishing a wooden spoon like a serial killer's dagger, about to attack an innocent dish on table. The caption reads 'Asking Simon to lend a hand in the kitchen was always a big mistake...'

Baxter, I believe, must be a bit of a psychic because this Simon has always been a complete hob yob when it comes to cooking. For the whole of my adult life I have aligned myself with the glorious ineptitude of fellow kitchen klutz P.J.O'Rourke's character as featured in his Modern Manners, and delighted in the fact that I was in good company with the likes of Ian Fleming - a cook 'so abominable' that Noël Coward would cross himself as he ate Fleming's food. 'Ian, darling,' he used to say, 'it tastes like armpits.'

But to my escalating shame, can't cook, won't cook chaps like me are becoming a minority. These days many of my male contemporaries can, will and want to cook. Not just to show off at a dinner party once a month, either. This lot regularly, whip up ambitious dishes. Some of them have become so smugly accomplished that their wives have hung up their pinnies for good. They are not alone either. At London's Leith's School of Food and Wine the full-time courses have a 30 per cent male attendance.

According to reliable reports even Mick Jagger is making his own jam these days. Why? Well the home cooking thing ticks a lot of boxes.It is therapeutic, trendy,and macho. Cooking is also girl-pleasing and involves the purchasing of some highly expensive, non-essential kit. Oh, and the fact that lots of cool men can cook too - Tony Soprano, Anthony Bourdain, Michael Caine's Harry Palmer and his creator, Len Deighton (who wrote several cook books) - adds extra spice to the pot. Marco Pierre White, who helped tenderise men's attitude to cooking and made the chef's whites sexy, thinks it's 'an alpha male thing. Men have always fancied themselves as cooks but 20 years ago the typical man's contribution would be the carving of the joint - the macho part of the process - because that was the only bit he felt confident doing.

Say what you like about TV chefs but they've made it OK for men to be seen in the kitchen and actually cooking.' But has our nation of Gazzas really transformed into a country of Wozzas? We talked to six men about their cooking to find out.

The DJ
· Pete Tong lives in Wimbledon with his wife Debbie and three children.

Like most men I got into cooking by watching my Mum making the Sunday dinner. When I first started, I copied her religiously but then Nigel Slater in The Observer and Jamie Oliver on TV started to influence me. There's no doubt in my mind that Jamie in particular made cooking more appealing to men.

There are quite a lot of similarities with deejaying and cooking. They are both obsessively solo things. When I'm cooking I don't want anyone in the kitchen just as people hanging around in my DJ booth can get in the way. With both you have to get the timing right, plan ahead and work out what is going to please the crowd. The equipment is important too. My favourite bit of kit is my Waring juicer. My kitchen is a Bulthaup. It's very functional and semi-professional. In our last house we had one of those all stainless steel, bachelor jobs which I now believe are the mark of a non-cooking household.

Does my wife appreciate my cooking? Well, to be honest, it can be a point of friction because she says I'm doing it for my own enjoyment, only when I want to do it, which I suppose is true. Recently, I've tried out more elaborate things like stuffed clams and the odd Thai dish but it's not easy getting the ingredients. Bayley and Sage near our house is good and we have a good butcher, Randalls, nearby. Being a DJ is not great if you are into food. I'm constantly on the road and often motorway junk food is all that's available. I've worked in the Far East which is a joy - a real gastronomic tour. I'm off to Argentina next week. I can't wait. I've heard the meat is the best in the world.

The Editor

· Dylan Jones, editor of GQ, lives with his wife Sarah, who works in fashion, and two young daughters

I began cooking when I was a student. I started with cooking stuff in one pan then moved on to two. I loved the kit. I built up an arsenal of impressive-looking but rather unnecessary equipment by Starck and Alessi which I would employ during the preparation of my repertoire of five dishes. All designed to impress girls, of course. When I got married, my wife replaced my kit with stuff that actually worked.

I'd say that I'm more of a sous chef than a head chef, chopping stuff up for Sarah; but my signature dish is putanesca, whore's pasta, which I believe is better than the one at San Lorenzo. At dinner parties, I like to team up with a male friend and take over the kitchen. You can drink as much as you like without getting nagged at. I'm going on a cookery course in France, which will involve a lot of duck and foie gras.And lots of wine, I hope.

The Footballer

· Graeme Le Saux, who plays for Chelsea FC, lives with his wife and two children. When he is not on the pitch, he can often be found at the River Cafe eating - and sometimes in the kitchen.

It's dangerous to mix sex and food - the result can be disastrous. Apparently. The only way I have combined them is by making romantic meals for my wife. But I do that very rarely. I've cooked for myself from a very early age. I like the creative side of it. I have to make healthy food so I avoid rich ingredients and cook a lot of pasta (I need carbohydrates). I'm no expert so I've got loads of cookery books. I prefer restaurants to cooking. The River Cafe is the best restaurant in London. Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers, joint owners and head chefs, are good friends. Ruthie once challenged me to work in the restaurant kitchen for a day. She said football isn't proper work! So I spent the day chopping vegetables. I got through it but learnt that it takes a lot of flair. I think I'll stick to amateur cooking and professional football.

The Writer
· Sir Max Hastings, is president of the Council for the Protection of Rural England. He is an ex-editor of the Daily Telegraph and London Evening Standard. He lives in Berkshire.

All my years as an editor, I had to eat out every day - one got so bored. Now eating at home is pure bliss. Penny, my wife, says I'm a food bore because I am always talking about the next meal. She gets fed up with me examining the contents of our deep freeze. What I'm really into is making the most of simple ingredients. My wife and I behave like caricatures from The Good Life. All summer we live off our garden. We also eat a lot of fish - I catch trout nearby - and freeze about 10 salmon that I have caught each year. And we make apple juice - we have our own press - enough to last six months.

There is no limit to what you can do if you've got your own vegetables and unlimited quantities of stock. When we eat game, the bones go into the stockpot. I shoot a lot and freeze at least 100 birds a year. I've always been mad about food. I was in Kashmir on an assignment in 1971 and cabled Wilton's to make a booking. It was 100 degrees and there I was visualising the menu at Wilton's. Would I have the lobster or salmon?

The Designer
· Bill Amberg, lives in London with his wife, Vogue's Susie Forbes, and three young daughters.

I've been cooking since I left home. As a kid I spent a lot of time travelling so I became an accomplished camp cook. I'm quarter-Danish and quarter-Finnish and I like a lot of cured meats and salamis and fish such as salmon and mackerel. I do a mean gravadlax. We have an open-door policy at our house where we have a big open-plan kitchen and everybody mucks in. I like to make a traditional Scandinavian dish, which I call 'scrap pie'. It's made up of bacon, onion, potatoes and cream. It is delicious. I also love pig roasts - I've made my own roasting spit with a chopped up oil drum.Once I did a roast for 40 people. Susie doesn't really like cooking but I get a lot of help from the kids. They are quite experimental. My chicken nuggets are always a hit with them - so much better than nasty, ready-made ones.You just whizz up some cornflakes in the Magimix until grainy, roll some chicken fillet slices in olive oil, cover in cornflakes and fry. Guaranteed to make your kids love you!

The actor
· John Pearson, formerly the world's most successful male model, now a successful actor, lives in London with his wife Alison, fashion director of Harpers and Queen, and two young sons.

When I was modelling I lived in New York and I used to have terrible cravings for English food. I come from Yorkshire, so I love traditional stuff like shepherd's pie, and Sunday roast. I think you have to come from the cold north to really appreciate that type of food. I started cooking to provide myself with comfort food after a night out. I still do a mean shepherd's pie and a great Bolognese but I'm more adventurous now.

The last thing I cooked was a pasta for the kids but tonight I'll be doing Thai tom kha kai soup with chicken,mushrooms and lime leaves. I like cooking Thai because it is exotic and sophisticated but not too filling. I had to watch my weight when I was a model and recently I noticed that I had put on a few pounds. My wife was on this cabbage soup diet so I tried it. It was incredible. I did it for a week and the weight just fell off. I really like cooking for my boys. Our last au pair was Croatian and she showed me a great recipe for hash browns, adding a vegetable stock called podravka, lightly frying the spuds adding a bit of grated carrot and a few onions. I've learnt that colour is very important to kids when it comes to food.

· Euan Ferguson's Domestic Slob column returns next month.