It’s 6pm on a bleak Saturday night and the village of Robertson in the NSW Southern Highlands has been plunged into winter. The main street is deserted but inside Moonacres’ cooking school, a fire blazes, a long table is set for dinner and 30 guests – glasses of preservative-free pinot in hand – hover around a stainless-steel kitchen island artfully styled with cauliflowers, cabbages, oranges, eggs and just-dug potatoes.

Eilish Maloney, chef and founder of The What If Society holds court: the occasion, a seasonal winter cooking class. Five feet tall, her arms covered in fine-line lobster, lightbulb and bumblebee tattoos, what the 29-year-old lacks in height she makes up for in powerhouse personality. “When I’m peeling this carrot, I’m thinking what am I going to do with the top?” she muses, hovering halfway between serious and jovial. “Am I going to make a pesto? A chimichurri? What? I’m always thinking zero waste.”