As a child, Trish Deseine was constantly told by her parents how lucky she was. She grew up on a beef farm in Co Antrim as Trish Stevens -- the middle child and only daughter -- who loved to "stomp around the fields" with her father at the weekends, who was taught to appreciate good food from an early age and the value of education.

Her parents impressed on her that she was blessed to come from such a beautiful and bountiful place, a belief she carried with her to school in Belfast, where the "townies" may have considered her a culchie, Trish now admits, but she was oblivious. Young Trish Deseine truly felt fortunate and, it seems, it is something she has carried into adult life, determinedly viewing life with a glass-half-full attitude, even when life and love and loss have tested it.

Today, as we meet for lunch in Dublin, Trish Deseine has plenty to be happy about. It is the day after her TV series, Trish's Paris Kitchen, made its debut on RTE One and she is happy with how the show turned out, though it is funny, she remarks, that the first programme was concerned with moderation in all things, a philosophy she applies to life beyond just food. For these days in Dublin, promoting her series and companion book, fall in the middle of the week she is without her four children, who live alternate weeks with Trish and her estranged French husband, Thierry. And she could easily be pining and feeling guilty for enjoying herself in Ireland, but she is not.

"France has finally got to me, I've become truly epicurean," she laughs. "I believe in moderation in everything, in relationships as much as everything else. It took a little bit of mental gymnastics, but I got there."

Trish Deseine got her first taste of France was she was 13, on a school trip to Paris. "It was so exotic and so different to Northern Ireland," she recalls. "I just fell in love with the place and just wanted to keep going back." She had felt like that previously on a trip to Edinburgh, and it was partly a desire to be anywhere but Seventies Ulster. "Those were not wonderful years in Northern Ireland and so it was always assumed that I would study at Trinity or somewhere else."

So, Trish Stevens went to Edinburgh to study French and it was there, in her final year that she met Thierry Deseine, who was promoting French food in Scotland. When the couple married after three years, in 1990, they moved to France.

Now, Deseine describes the life and family in which she immersed herself as "a cocoon". She put great pressure on herself, she explains, to exceed their expectations of this newcomer Irish girl as a cook, threw herself into entertaining and honed her already impressive cooking ability to chef standards without any formal training. In 1992, she had her first son, Corentin, with Timothy following five years later and another son, Tanguy, only a year after. Around the time of Tanguy's birth, the Northern Irish Tourist Board closed its Paris office, where Deseine worked in PR, and the family moved to the country, near Thierry's family.

"I really threw myself into it," smiles Deseine, "country life and counting my roses and repairing the house and it was lovely but not for very long. When you've had an education and you've always worked, it feels like you've amputated a part of your sanity when you stop and it didn't work for me."

As a cook, however, this period did a lot for Deseine. Their friends tended to be Parisians who weekended in the country and the Deseine house became the centre of all the entertaining. "Looking back, it was probably an effort to generate adult company on my part," says Deseine, tucking into the brown bread she misses so much in France. "I haven't messed around much with bread," she admits. "As flour millers, my in-laws were evangelical about bread, so I never really dared try it."

Though she craved a career after a period enjoying her rural idyll, Trish Deseine makes no bones about the fact that the family life that is now over is her greatest loss. While she cannot talk about her husband specifically, or their impending divorce, Deseine is frank about her sadness at their separation.

"But it's about not viewing that as a failure but deciding to see it as a glass-half-full situation," Deseine adds quickly. Despite her childhood grounding in optimism, however, this took some effort.

Four years ago, when their youngest child, Victoire, a daughter, was four, Trish and Thierry Deseine separated. By that time, the family had relocated from the country back to Paris -- "as soon as life became calm or settled, we seemed to always need to jiggle it up a bit" -- where the children attend a bilingual school. Further, Trish had relaunched herself into the world of work. She began a shortlived mail-order company, selling ingredients and kitchen equipment, began a successful chocolate business, and was doing demonstrations at exhibitions for women -- "accomplished ladies, all very Jane Austen-esque", she laughs -- when a publisher approached her to write a book. In 2001, Petits plats entre amis was published and became a bestseller in France, as did Je veux du chocolat! the following year. She wrote four more books for the French market over the next four years but only published her first English-language book, Nobody Does it Better, last year, finally fulfilling a dream that is not only about work but about extending her life, post-separation, beyond France.

"There was an element of feeling I belonged less, yes," says Deseine of how her relationship with France altered after her marriage broke up. "My vision of France has been de-romanticised, if that's a word. I had no expat friends before. I know France better now, I think, and I always knew there were aspects of it that are old-fashioned and frustrating and all that, but now I find them actually affecting me it's different. I was in a cocoon before, which was very sweet and comfortable, but that's over now."

One of the most challenging aspects for Deseine has been the adjustment to shared custody. One week, she explains, the children live with her and the next with their father. It is fair, it is how she believes it should be, but that's not to say it is not difficult.

"It took some effort," she says, "but I realised that if you approach anything with a positive mental attitude you can find the good in it. And it became apparent to me that I was in some ways living my girlfriends' fantasy, to have a full week concentrating on home and the kids, and then a full week focusing on work and not worrying about creche and homework and doing the double job all mothers do."

And it works, Trish Deseine insists. She went to Cornwall for a three-week detox after writing a baking book and testing all the recipes, while the children were in Corsica with their father, windsurfing and waterskiing and doing things she'd hate, after which they had three wonderful weeks with her.

"It concentrates the role of each parent," she says, "and hopefully the sum of that will be OK. Example is an important thing and as long as one of the parents is still communicating just how wonderful life is and can be and how lucky they all are, that's a glass-half-full situation and then the rest just falls into place."

In her career, that is exactly how it seems, not only from the outside, but to Deseine herself. She didn't plan or consciously aspire to become a writer or a television personality, but now it has happened, she couldn't be happier.

Last year, Deseine did an item on Richard Corrigan's RTE series and after that was approached with the idea of her own series.

"Everyone involved was so far removed from anyone I'd met in TV in France," says Deseine. "I'm sure there are nice people in TV in France, but I've only met people who were completely objectionable, so it was very refreshing and exciting and it also meant, which I am thrilled about, that I could come back here to Ireland."

Pronouncing herself a European at heart, Deseine spells out an ambition to have a place in Ireland eventually. France will always be home, even when the children are grown, but she would love a place in Dublin, "while the food lover in me would love west Cork".

This is the dream, anyway, Trish Deseine insists, and it's no harm to be optimistic. The alternative, as she knows too well, is to sink into something that will do you no good and get you nowhere.

"In the past, while I was married, I was more placid and more allowing things to just happen but then, that was my dream," she explains. "My dream was a happy family life, the kids, that was all I ever wanted. All this stuff is nothing I ever planned or aspired to, but that was. I'm lucky to have this career to hang on to, when, in fact, my original dream didn't work out. Because that was it for me and it's really sad, very sad. "But it's good that something good has come out of it," smiles Trish Deseine, still the girl who truly believes herself very lucky.

'Trish's Paris Kitchen' is on RTE One, Wednesdays, at 7.30pm. Her latest book, 'Trish's French Kitchen', is published by Kyle Cathie at €25

- Sarah Caden