For some, this sentiment from a chef might come as a surprise. Isn’t the meal — the char grilled cheeses with endive and wild honeycomb, or hung pork with lemon leaves and blistered grapes — what a chef relishes? Isn’t it what they hope will bring pleasure and satisfaction to those they feed? And that when this culinary celebration is complete, they might rest easy in its completion?

Glover, a Tasmanian chef and author, acknowledges the beautiful transformation food undergoes to reach its ultimate presentation, but she’s most attuned to the people and preparation of the meal.

“The passion behind my cooking is community,” Glover emphasizes. “My friends and family add to my creativity and drive my writing and cooking. Most humans have lost not only the connection to the land that feeds us, but also to the people we share our food with.”

For Glover, reinvigorating this connection between land and people revolves around what is primal and elemental in cooking and feeding others. And the place this ought to happen is around a fire where she believes we should all gather.

Her earliest memory of cooking over a fire is camping in Tasmania when she was 16 years old. She and a few friends were out surfing off an island, and after hours of being bashed by waves, the sun was dipping low and taking the heat of the day with it. “We were tired and hungry and just needed to eat,” she remembers with a laugh. The crew cooked bangers and mash (sausages and mashed potatoes) and jaffle toasties (Australian mountain pies) over a piled driftwood fire. “Nights in Tasmania are cold, and so the fire not only acts as a food source, but a heat source as well. There were all these emotive elements on the beach because we were salty from the ocean, warm from the fire, and with good company.”

Long before any cooking success, before she ever barbecued meat over open flames, Glover had been harvesting her own food. She caught and ate her first parrotfish when she was 10—“They aren’t particularly nice eating, but I didn’t care!”—and shot her first rabbit at 13—“Fish are cold, all the meat I’d handled before I killed the rabbit was cold, so it was a sensory overload from the warmth of those guts and blood. That was really the start of my appreciating the process of eating.” Growing up in the outdoors and around commercial fishing and farming laid the foundation of Glover’s understanding of where food comes from, particularly food we are connected to.

As an author, Glover sets the natural world at the forefront of her recipes. The beach, a mountainside, or the bush is where she builds her kitchen. Her cooking features dynamic techniques, ingredients still quivering with life, and an imagination that will make you want to run in the muck with her. Her cookbooks, Wild Adventure Cookbook and Wild Child Adventure Cooking with Kids push the boundaries of foraging, wild game, and where and how you think you can cook.

So much of Glover’s recipe-writing inventiveness comes from a childhood of roaming the Tasmanian countryside. A childhood that involved risks and explorations, culminating in her confidence to explore, ask questions, and reach beyond herself.

Glover’s imagination was displayed at her most recent backyard family barbecue while visiting Florida when she cooked an entire alligator on her Traeger.

“The heart behind the Wild Child book is what my childhood represented with my brothers, which was going on an adventure,” Glover explains.

“At first, I didn’t marry cooking and adventure together, which is what I now want to empower in others. Kids don’t need a frying pan. They can cook in a shell or wrap a fish in paper. Just go up a river and eat!”

Children’s willingness to try new things is why Glover loves to cook with them, but she fears society dampens that willingness as we age. “Kids ask such incredible questions that I often don’t know the answer to, and I need to figure out. Adults have so much more fear of others, of failure, that they don’t try many things outside of their control, and that’s unfortunate. We haven’t allowed ourselves to be inquisitive. To make me a better chef, person, and adventurer, I need to be inquisitive. I need imagination.”

Glover’s imagination was on full display at her most recent backyard family barbecue when she cooked an entire alligator on her Traeger.

After an unsuccessful gator hunting season, Glover procured the gator from a local farmer and butcher. “He gets me all my crazy stuff,” she says with a laugh. Glover uses Traeger’s Fin & Feather rub to cover the skinned animal. “It’s a really good mix to use because gator meat is so complex you don’t want to overpower it. The raw texture looks like fish meat, but the flavor profile is pork. I guess it’s fishy pork, not in a bad way, but just that combination. Fish and pork are both good!”

Next, Glover removes the fat on the back of the gator where the tail meets the body because the reptilian lard doesn’t render out. She then stuffs a spicy sausage mix into the vacated cavity to infuse flavor and pork fat to moisten the flesh. “I love cooking animals whole,” she says. “The bones, marrow, and good fats give it so much more flavor than a broken-down piece of meat. You just don’t need to do too much.”

Along with the gator, Glover plans to roast oysters that she foraged for the first time in Florida. “Back home in Tasmania, the oysters grow on the rocks, but here in Florida, they grow in the mud flats, so that was different and new,” she says. “They have great oysters here, very briny and salty.”