WHISK-WIELDING MEN HOLD THEIR OWN IN THE KITCHEN

Tom Harte credits his formidable appetite for spawning an interest in creating savory cuisine.

Notwithstanding the idyllic icon of an apron-clad Betty Crocker laboring to prepare an elegant meal for her husband and children, some whisk-wielding men can hold their own in the kitchen.

Harte, a speech professor at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau, is a case in point.

His brainchild, My Daddy's Cheesecake, is a well-known eating establishment that features... well, cheesecake.

But even the most seasoned cheesecake connoisseur would be amazed at some of Harte's creations. It's a passion he cultivated while a graduate student at the University of Illinois.

"It really was an outgrowth of my interest in eating," Harte says. "I come from a family where we had dessert at lunch, every day.

"I grew up with a keen love of food. It was not that my mother was a particularly sophisticated or fancy cook, but she was a very good cook."

But out of necessity upon completion of graduate school, Harte found himself driven to the kitchen.

"My wife was still in grad school and didn't have enough time to cook, so I started doing the cooking," Harte recalls. "I've been cooking ever since.

"It's the kind of thing I really graduated to out of necessity, but it's something I really enjoy."

He remembers baking hundreds of cookies every Christmas, which led to his experimenting with other desserts -- his specialty.

"Whenever I go out to dinner, I always look at the dessert side of the menu," he says. "It helps to give me ideas for when I cook. I really like to try unusual combinations of ingredients, and although I am somewhat recipe-bound, I will take liberties with a recipe."

One of Harte's colleagues, Norman Braasch, also enjoys cooking.

But Harte places the biology professor in the category of gourmet cooks.

"I'm no gourmet cook," says Harte. "I'm not above taking shortcuts, and I'm too influenced by trendy things.

"A couple years ago I was making these chocolate paper bags with strawberries coming out of it. Norm would never try that."

Braasch humbly denies Harte's characterization.

"It's really nothing unusual," claims Braasch. "It's just that I work out of the kitchen every once in a while."

Like Harte, Braasch's culinary curiosity was piqued while in graduate school at the University of Nebraska.

"There was a group of students interested in it as well, and we did a lot of things together," he says. "Once a month, we pooled our resources when the paychecks came in and elected to do something along the lines of a meal.

"Sometimes it was a simple lunch. Other times it was something unusual."

A topic of conversation at any meeting of his past school chums is the Autumn dish Braasch whipped up for one of the meals.

"In Nebraska, the guys all went pheasant hunting and we had some pheasants," he recalls. "So they said, `Braasch, what can we do with this.'

"We had a dinner of pheasant with a white wine cream sauce, along with a number of other things, that was quite good."

In academic circles, Braasch and his wife, Kay, would gather with friends for dinner parties, house to house. "That was probably the impetus for a number of things I experimented with," Braasch says. "We got into a variety of ethnic food."

He favors Italian dishes, and although he rarely follows a recipe, Braasch says the art of cooking is relatively basic.

"If you have meats, tomatoes and a variety of spices, you can do almost anything," he says. "Pasta, also, is a tremendous staple. There are so many things you can do with that.

"But it's really just doing ordinary things, nothing unusual. You have a feel for how it comes together, and keep an eye out for texture and color."

Harte's usually bound by whatever ingredients a particular recipe calls for, unlike his wife.

"She can make anything out of whatever's in the refrigerator," he says. "She'll probably never make it again, but she's much more resourceful than I."

With an affinity for rich desserts -- he claims his pralines are especially good, along with a toffee recipe friends rave about -- Harte admits he's had a lifetime struggle with the bulge.

"I went through a wellness screening and some of the numbers were pretty alarming, so I've gone into this low-fat thing with a vengeance," he says. "The problem is, it's tough to find low-fat desserts to cook.

"I've got one recipe that calls for a pound of chocolate and a pound of butter. Obviously, that's not something I can cook anymore."

And yet Harte claims that most dietitians concede that a little indulgence isn't so bad.

"It's not really that you can't eat a particular food," he says. "It's just that you have to eat sensibly."