Lance Corporal Allan, aged 23, has been in the Army five years and has an impressive array of awards to his name, including Scottish Junior Chef of the Year.
Within a few hours of stepping off the helicopter he had rustled up his famous 'Jock Pasties', filled with baked beans, ham and cheese. He said:
"I am delighted to be back with the lads. I cooked for the company throughout our pre-deployment training in Kenya and then back in the UK.
"I couldn't have asked for a better group of friends. It goes beyond that though. The lads mean everything to me. They are my second family."
LCpl Allan has been equipped with a brand new, 'winterised' cookhouse from which to work.
The new kitchen has been named 'The Jordan Rossi Cookhouse' after Sapper Jordan Rossi, who was tragically killed by an improvised explosive device while on patrol nearby in May 2009.
It is a much needed improvement, with LCpl Allan and his fellow chefs benefiting from greater space and better appliances, vital to feed over one hundred soldiers three times a day.
LCpl Allan is very much a soldier first.
'Combat Chef', as he is known among the soldiers of 1 SCOTS, spent parts of pre-deployment training as a member of an infantry platoon. He is trained to handle the full range of infantry weapons, from the pistol to the grenade machine gun.
Asked about the relevance of his training to his day-to-day job, LCpl Allan said:
"One minute you could be in the kitchen, cooking away, the next minute you could be in a Sangar [fortified position] firing at insurgents, or find yourself sent to an isolated Patrol Base. You just never know."
He is now planning some feasts for the coming months. Tinned rations are hard to glamorise, but LCpl Allan plans to put on a big effort for Burns Night, complete with haggis!