Located within the Yarraville village, Serious Cooks and Books and Cooking Classes is a foodies' outlet well-stocked with kitchen hardware and accessories.

Alongside the standard products of saucepans, knife sets and appliances, you will find Bodum saucepans, decorative platters, bread making equipment and mixtures, essential ingredients, gourmet foods and hampers, all of the latest cook book releases and advice on action in the kitchen.

Jill Adams, the owner-manager of the store also runs Saturday morning demonstrations and more formal classes. The style of cooking taught ranges from bread making to Southern Indian. The classes are hands on, and participants work together around a custom-made work bench. Whatever is made is eaten after the class with a glass or two of wine.

After coming home from a busy day at work, more and more Melburnians are getting ready to go out again - to take a cooking class. The number of cooking schools in Melbourne has grown significantly over the last five years, indicating that we are increasingly interested in the collective experience of enjoying food. We are finding that the skills of the kitchen are timeless, especially now that we have a wider range of culinary styles and more types of food available. The number of schools and classes also indicate the entrepreneurial skills of those who take them. Whether professionally trained chefs or self-starters building a successful second wave career, the instructors of these classes are responding to the call of those hungry for stimulation or social activity, and the need to know how to put together a damn fine feed.

It's not often that you walk into a cooking class and come across a majority of male participants, let alone a course that is entirely attended by men. But this is clearly the case in the Blokes Only cooking course run by Jill Adams at her Yarraville studio.

Part of Jill's motivation in offering the course was her past experience teaching mixed groups where she felt that the male members held back in their participation which meant that their enjoyment suffered. Perhaps they felt anxiety about the unfamiliar surroundings of the kitchen and the equipment, or the scrutiny when it came to the hands-on aspect of the class - or perhaps the chatter was more about husbands, children and low-fat foods than work, politics and hardware. So no-nonsense Jill responded with a course which allowed men to come together and learn how to make some very edible dishes. They might also find that following recipes and cooking are very much similar to activities considered more traditionally mechanical. And, along the way, Jill says, her members may well have the chance to widen their conversational menu.