I was working as an interior architect after university, and I remember I said to my husband, “I don’t want to do all these buildings and all this design stuff. I just want to bake a cake. I just want to put something in the oven, take it out and put it on the table.”My husband is a photographer, and he started to involve me in his work because sometimes he’d need a food stylist, although in those days it wasn’t called that. One job led to another, and then it all got out of hand. I opened my own little restaurant with my cousin. I’ve written books, I write for magazines and do TV shows. I just came across a lot of nice paths, and I took them. Cooking has always been part of my life. I was born in Dún Laoghaire in Dublin, and I grew up in Dundrum. It was the 1970s, and Dundrum was a very small village; everyone knew each other, and we were always popping in and out to each other, so the doors were always open.My mum moved to Ireland [from Holland] when she was really young with my dad, and she couldn’t speak English at first. She had me when she was 21 or 22, so she still had a lot to learn about being independent. I was always on the stool beside her, baking and cooking. She made some Dutch things from memory and things she learned from neighbours and friends she met in Dublin. She used to get clippings of recipes from her mother in the Netherlands. I still have her folder with all these little cuttings from magazines. My parents loved us to be creative, so they used to make these little booklets with us of everything we learned. Everything my mum taught me, like baking soda bread or simple things like scrambled eggs, I would jot down in my little book. I couldn’t write at first, so I would draw all the recipes. I still do drawings for my cookbooks. Nothing’s really changed.We moved to Holland when I was 10, and my sister was five. I remember thinking the roads were so big compared to Ireland, and that Dutch people were very, very organised. Yvette Van Boven: ‘People in Holland don’t know much about Ireland.’ Photograph: Oof Verschuren I kept in touch with my friends in Ireland. I had pen pals, and my parents let me go back on my own when I was 11 or 12 to visit. Even as time moved on and I was out discovering the world, I always believed that I was only in Holland for a while, and I would go back to Ireland. When I met my husband, we started travelling to Ireland a lot because I wanted to show him the country that I came from. Each time we went, we’d go to a different part of the country, from the Burren to Galway, but we really loved west Cork. I always say when I drive off the ferry and come out into Ireland that my heart goes back into its right place. I can actually breathe again.My husband and I used to lie in bed daydreaming and looking at houses on Daft, saying “oh that’s a nice cottage, that’s a lovely house”. It was just a dream, but then we saw this one cottage in west Cork. It kept popping up, and it just didn’t sell. We were wondering if there was something wrong with the house, because it looked great and the price wasn’t very high. So when we were there on holiday, I said, “let’s just see it and get it out of our heads”. We came to the house on a nice day in the summer, and we just looked at each other and thought, we love it. It was old, and there was a lot of work to do, but we just made the decision.I always tell myself not to regret things. Just make a decision and then just go for it. Because if you keep looking back, you can regret everything in life. We bought the house in 2018, and we spend about half the year in Ireland now. When we are in Amsterdam, we are always working and running around, but in Ireland, it is a slower pace. [ The artists of Sherkin Island off west Cork: ‘You might not see anyone for a couple of weeks’Opens in new window ]I’ve written about 14 or 15 big cookbooks and a few smaller collections, and we always have pictures of Ireland in them. People in Holland know Ireland is part of my life and my heart, but a lot of people don’t know much about the country, about its beauty and its strong identity. I wanted to make a TV show to highlight these things and the people who are working so hard in the food industry, trying to change things and working with the way the land is at this moment.The television broadcasting people in Holland were a bit anxious at first; they weren’t sure how interested Dutch people were going to be in Ireland. But I’m so happy with the reaction to the show, Bij Van Boven thuis, in Ierland (At Van Boven’s Home, in Ireland). People have written to me that they were crying at the last episode because it was over. I was really surprised by how many people loved it, and I think there will now be a second season. Bij Van Boven thuis, in Ierland is available to watch online at npo.nl