I should have known the Sat Nav was plotting against me the moment it tried to send us through a canal in Bruges. Three hours from Calais, bleary-eyed and craving chips, we finally crawled into Diksmuide proper only to discover I had been confidently reading the house number upside down for the last twenty minutes. There we stood, suitcases in hand, knocking on the door of a bemused Flemish grandmother who spoke not a word of English but communicated her confusion magnificently through eyebrow gymnastics alone. My partner found this hilarious. I found a beer imperative.

The proper house, when located, proved worth every mortifying minute. A proper Flanders holiday home, all brick and sensible shutters, with a kitchen that immediately declared itself the heart of the place. I am no cook, mind you. My culinary repertoire at home extends to toast and optimistic pasta. Yet something about that spacious kitchen, those gleaming countertops, the proximity to actual Belgian ingredients, filled me with dangerous ambition.

The morning market in Diksmuide's Grote Markt became our church. Every Tuesday we worshipped at stalls heaving with West Flanders cheeses, proper butter, those fat white asparagus the locals revere like royalty. I bought speculoos biscuits by the kilo, reasoning they were basically currency. My first attempt at cooking? A catastrophic omelette involving aged Gouda and something I mistook for spring onions but which the greengrocer later identified, laughing, as ornamental chives. We ate it anyway, standing at the kitchen counter, drinking Trappist beer at eleven in the morning because we were technically on holiday and technically Belgian now.

The pubs of Diksmuide deserve their own religion. De Goeste, just off the market square, became our local within forty-eight hours. The landlord, a man whose moustache deserved listed building status, learned our order by day three: two Westmalle Tripels, a portion of kaasblokjes, those little cubes of aged cheese that make you weep with happiness. We talked to strangers, which we never do at home. An elderly chap explained, in magnificent broken English, the proper technique for eating mussels. Another regular insisted we try eels in green sauce, a Flemish classic apparently, though my partner's face suggested "classic" might mean "survived by tradition alone."

I attempted stoemp one evening, that hearty mash of potatoes and vegetables that sustains Flemish farmers through bitter winters. My version resembled something already digested. We abandoned ship, marched to 't Molenhof, and ate proper Flemish stew instead, beef braised in beer until it surrenders completely, served with fries that put my entire cooking career to shame. The chef, spotting my defeated expression, sent over a complimentary jenever. Dutch courage, he called it. I called it salvation.

By week's end, my kitchen ambitions had settled into comfortable realism. I could assemble a respectable cheese board. I could pour beer with appropriate reverence. I could navigate the market without buying decorative vegetation. We cooked simple things: bread, butter, cured ham, tomatoes still warm from the sun. We ate them on the terrace with wine from the Colruyt supermarket, watching the light change over the flat Flemish fields, talking nonsense, growing pleasantly round.

That grandmother's eyebrows still haunt my dreams. But Diksmuide fed me, literally and otherwise, with a generosity I had not expected. I arrived hungry and slightly lost. I left fuller in every sense, already plotting my return, already promising myself I would finally learn to cook properly. The promise felt genuine at the time. It still does, sat here with my toast, remembering that perfect kitchen and all the magnificent meals I never quite managed to make.