On losing old habits and finding new love

Roz Purcell is Ireland’s healthy-eating domestic goddess. She talks to Barry Egan about life with her music promoter boyfriend Zach Desmond; feeling intimidated by Donald Trump when she was a beauty queen; how she learned to change her negative relationsh

How Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm

(After They’ve Seen Paree?) became a popular hit after World War I ended. The song is about American soldiers from rural backgrounds reluctant to go back to farm life, having experienced the bright lights of Paris while stationed overseas, and I imagined the lyrics might reflect Roz Purcell’s perspective on life: the country girl from a farm in Tipperary, who has modelled in Paris, New York and Las Vegas, and won TV3’s Celebrity Come Dine with

Me on TV3 in 2012. Yet, au contraire. Roz, who lives in swish Sandycove, with her boyfriend, Zach, could see herself moving back to work on the land one day...

“I always think I wouldn’t, but then I spend a weekend down the country — anywhere down the country — and I feel so at home,” the bestselling cookery author and blogger admits. But, she adds, “It would have to be a low-maintenance veg farm, because at the moment I can’t even keep my herbs alive with this heat.”

Environmentally friendly Roz is currently doing her best to keep the planet alive a little bit longer. She keeps a bucket in the shower to catch the water that most people would just let run down the drain. Every morning, after she has had a wash, she waters the plants and the herbs with the water from her trusty bucket.

Ireland’s healthy-living domestic goddess does not, she says, believe in God. “It’s simple why I don’t. Evolution makes more sense.”

Did you go to Mass every Sunday in Tipperary? What did that instil in you as an adult?

“We did, but I kind of just went to keep my dad or my grandparents company. Growing up, I didn’t think much about it. My grandparents, Ida and Johnson, were very religious, and their values of treating everyone equally was something everyone spoke about after they passed. So I’d like to think I took that from them.”

In 2015, Roz was forced to dwell more deeply on the meaning of life and death when her big sister, Rachel, was diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukaemia, a rare form of cancer that affects the blood and bone marrow.

“I guess after my sister got CML, I realised life is so short, and you only get one run at it, so I definitely changed a lot. My philosophy shifted towards being present, enjoying the small things, and not having so much fear about where I was going next,” Roz says.

Making the most of it

“It definitely brought us all closer together,” Roz adds. “The first week felt surreal. We were all just a bit shell-shocked [at the diagnosis] but gradually, as a lot of Irish families do, we tried to make the most out of a bad situation and find humour in the smallest of things. I think Rachel was probably the most collected, and managed it really well. She was the one keeping us all calm. It’s the worst thing hearing someone you love is sick. I probably dealt with it the worst. Rachel can tell you a few stories of how emotional I kept getting.”

Roz tells me stories about when she modelled, involving people coming up to her to say that she wasn’t “stuck-up” like they had imagined. Roz is neither stuck-up nor a diva of any worrying proportions. Traffic en route to meet her at the Alexander Hotel on a Friday evening in Dublin is awful, and I end up being 20 minutes late. She brushes off my embarrassed apologies. No doubt, a youth spent up at dawn, mucking out horse shite from the stables on her father John’s farm outside Fethard in Co Tipperary, gave Roz an unique sense of the time, and, indeed, of life.

“I was forever working on the farm. My dad would kill me for saying this, but we were probably the Fawlty Towers of farms. There was always a cow escaping, and I was always chasing after them,” says Roz, who had a cow named Daisy that she was friendly with when she was younger. “But I knew it was a food chain. I knew steak came from a farm,” says Roz, who gave up meat last Christmas.

“I would have spent a lot of time with my grandparents,” she says. “I loved them, obviously, but they gave me no chores. My mother used to have long lists of chores on the farm, including mucking out stables, feeding the horses.”

Roz’s parents built a house on the family farm and lived there. Could she and Zach build a house one day on the farm? “My days of chasing cows are over. And I couldn’t imagine seeing Zach on a farm at all. I don’t know how he’d deal with it.”

As a child, Roz was either outside doing chores for her mother, or inside, with her granny — who lived next door — baking for everyone.

“I’m pretty much still like that. People can never understand, when they get to know me, that I can never sit down. I always have to be doing something. I think it is almost the mentality of growing up on a farm: that there