How would you best describe your philosophy on food?
A steadfast commitment to venerating our local produce. An understanding that the best produce I can find is the closest to where I am standing right now. There’s a saying ‘you can’t polish a turd’  – never is that more true than with cooking. All the cooking technique in the world that you’ve learnt and synthesised over the years will not prevail if you’ve got shit produce. I celebrate spending more time sourcing produce than cooking it.

Has your approach to food changed in the last say ten years? If so, how?
Yes it has. I got out of restaurants probably five years ago. Restaurants have a real rhythm of drawing up menus and recipes, doing ordering, schedules, working in with rosters, working out if the dish has good food cost and yield – which is important, yes. But when I got out of restaurants, I applied what I had learnt in a totally different way. We set up our business Al’FreshCo, and we did farmers markets for the first two and a half years in New Farm. It really brought me right back down to earth – literally and metaphorically, and it really made me understand and re-engage with the seasons, with the earth, and with the produce. That really reset how we cooked. People aren’t after culinary athletics and culinary gymnastics.  I have never enjoyed my cooking more than I do now, and that’s probably to do with working the markets. It was a real epiphany, and realigned me with ingredients, rather than my culinary prowess. Yeah you need to know how to cook and respect ingredients, but when you meet the people that you buy ingredients from, then you feel a sense of obligation to treat it well. It’s not your place to turn it into a parallelogram on the plate and a fancy foam.

You’re at The Kitchens on Sunday August 27! Tell us, what can we expect?
Well, you can expect me to come down with nothing other than my chef’s jacket. Or maybe not even that! You know, I am one of you – yes I’m chef, but I am a cook, in the sense that what I will cook at The Kitchens is what I cook for our catering business and what I cook at home – which for me is both the same. I make it very clear that there is no correlation between how tricky something is to cook, and how great it tastes. So, really I’ll be cooking stuff that is an expression of what is available. The Kitchens is a wonderful celebration of our backyard. It’s funny, if I was doing a demonstration like this ten years ago, it would have been more of a vehicle for my technical skills, whereas now its about crystallising what good food is and what it isn’t … and what is isn’t is rhombuses on a plate, and dots and flowers everywhere for no reason. For people, inspirational cooking isn’t watching me breaking down a lamb in front of people and say ‘this is way I do it at home’, because that’s bollocks. So, it’ll be the simple stuff.

You’re quoted as saying, “The average shopping trolley of 30 items has travelled 70,000km to get in your trolley. That’s wrong.” Why do you think this is so important to your everyday family or home cooks?
That distance is two Jessica Watson trips, and there is no doubt you could drastically reduce that. The solution to all of this is right under our noses – by consciously choosing what we put in our mouths. We need to future proof our food security and support local farmers. The produce will last longer, and you’ll care for it more because you’ll have brought food with less people in the chain. I understand why we are importing 50 per cent of our fruit and vege and 70 per cent of our seafood – it’s hard to feed a family. I think we need to throw out all the pieces of the puzzle and start again, and look at what we’re eating and the quantities of things, like meat protein.  It’s not about how did you cook that, it’s where did you get that from? That concept dovetails beautifully into everything they are trying to achieve at The Kitchens, and to have the opportunity to talk about what I am passionate about in space where the product is right there, is a wonderful opportunity.

What’s been your favourite winter ingredient to work with?
Potatoes. I get them from Mt Sylvia in the southern part of the Lockyer Valley, grown by organic farmer Rob Bauer. They are peerless, they are the best. Anything I want to do to them, they are obedient and they will allow me to do it to them. To bake them, to mash them, to crush them  – they are amazing. They are meaty and waxy, yet creamy and dense. He’s grown them organically for the last 25 years.

What’s your earliest memory of food?
The smells that came out of our house in Belfast were very different to the smells of my friends houses. My mum would cook these lusty one-pot wonders – there was lots of spice and noodles. And she would also make Irish stew. There was a sense of generosity, and everyone sat at the table – there wasn’t much use for Instagram in those days! My Father used to make this wonderful chicken soup, and I still refer to that at certain times of the year. Putting a whole chicken in the pot, then throwing in barley and leafy greens. I can still taste it, and I can still see us sitting at the table – my father to the right, my brother to left, and my mother opposite. It’s amazing.

What’s the best piece of advice you can give the home cooks of the Gold Coast?
It’s probably the wrong place to seek inspiration opening up some sort of glossy food magazine. You can seek inspiration there, but also seek inspiration from the ingredients.

What keeps you inspired?
Ingredients! Cooking is a vocation, where if you rest, you rust. You’re not in this industry for renumeration, if you want money, then rob a bank. Generally speaking the primary producers that you are dealing with are driven by passion, they aren’t driven by the bottom line. They are nice, passionate people to be around  – and it’s galvanising and inspiring.

Keen to hear more? You can catch Alastair McLeod at The Kitchens at Robina Town Centre this Sunday August 27 for two cooking demonstrations! Head over here for more info.