I have never been so relieved to see a sign for thermal springs in my life, and that includes the time I accidentally wandered into a spa in Iceland wearing hiking boots. The drive to Stubicke Toplice from Zagreb had been straightforward enough, or so I thought until my phone decided that "Continental Croatia" sounded suspiciously like "middle of a field with no signal." I found myself navigating by the ancient British method of following someone who looked local and hoping they were not also lost. They were, as it turned out, heading to a completely different village, which I discovered only after twenty minutes of increasingly confident tailing.

When I finally rolled up to the property, I was in that peculiar state of travel delirium where everything feels slightly unreal. The house sat there looking terribly sensible and welcoming, while I sat in my hire car smelling of petrol station coffee and poor decisions. I had planned to arrive in time for a civilised lunch. It was now half past four and I had eaten nothing but a slightly furry travel mint since breakfast.

The first thing I did, because my priorities are exactly where they should be, was investigate the kitchen. I am one of those people who holidays with elaborate cooking fantasies. I picture myself at local markets, selecting perfect vegetables with the confidence of a person who knows what to do with them. The reality, as my partner will wearily confirm, involves more chaos and less competence. Still, the kitchen at Stubicke Toplice was promising. Clean, well-equipped, and crucially, possessed of a proper cooker rather than one of those holiday hotplets that takes forty minutes to warm a pan.

I unpacked my shopping with the triumphant air of a hunter returning with quarry. There is a small market in Stubicke Toplice itself, nothing fancy, just the sort of place where elderly women sell you things with an expression that suggests they remember when you were in nappies. I had bought eggs that were still faintly warm, some rather intimidating cured meat, and vegetables that actually smelled of something. This is the miracle of Continental Croatia, I am learning: food that tastes of itself.

My first evening's cooking attempt was, I will admit, ambitious. I had visions of a proper Croatian peasant feast, something rustic and authentic. What I produced was a decent omelette with questionable ham and a tomato salad that was genuinely excellent because the tomatoes needed absolutely no help from me. I sat on the terrace with a glass of the local white wine, which cost approximately nothing and tasted approximately of angels, and felt enormously pleased with myself. This is the holiday cooking delusion, and I fall for it every time.

The local pubs, or gostionicas as I learned to call them after some embarrassing pointing, became my second home. There is one not far from the property where the landlord speaks roughly six words of English and I speak roughly six words of Croatian, and between us we have constructed an elaborate communication system involving gestures, drawings, and occasionally just bringing food until I nod. The first time I went in, I ordered what I thought was a small beer and received something the size of my head. I drank it anyway, because British, and because it was excellent.

What I love about eating in this part of the world is the complete absence of pretension. Nobody is foam-ing anything or deconstructing a pudding. The food is simply good, honestly prepared, and served in quantities that suggest the kitchen is worried you might not have eaten since the war. I had a goulash one evening, thick and paprika-dark, with bread that soaked up the gravy in a way that made me genuinely emotional. The dumplings were heavy in that perfect Central European way, the sort of food that sits in your stomach like a friendly cat and refuses to move for several hours.

My market visits became a morning ritual. I would wander down with my string bag, feeling absurdly continental, and buy things I did not strictly need because they looked interesting. Some soft cheese that I later discovered was meant for spreading on bread, not eating in chunks while standing in the kitchen. Sour cherries that became a clafoutis of reasonable success. A sausage that I am still not entirely sure about, but which tasted magnificent fried with eggs and a reckless amount of butter.

The cooking improved, somewhat. I learned that Croatian cuisine rewards simplicity more than my usual tendency to throw everything into a pan and hope for the best. Good oil, good vegetables, a bit of meat if you fancy it. I made a decent brodet one evening, though I say so myself, standing at the stove with wine in hand and feeling briefly like a person who has their life together. The fish came from a van that appears in the village on Thursday mornings, and I bought it from a man who told me its entire life story, or possibly a recipe, I could not tell which.

By the end of the week, I had established a comfortable rhythm. Market in the morning, perhaps a pub lunch if I could not be bothered to cook, then an evening of attempted culinary brilliance with increasingly relaxed standards. I ate outside whenever possible, because the weather was being unreasonably kind and because everything tastes better with a view of trees and the distant possibility of a deer.

The funny thing about holiday cooking, I reflected on my final evening, is that it is never really about the food. I sat there with my slightly overcooked chicken and my genuinely spectacular roast potatoes, watching the light fade over the hills, and felt that particular contentment that comes from being temporarily useless in a beautiful place. I had not mastered Croatian cuisine. I had not even particularly mastered my own. But I had eaten well, drunk better, and learned that sometimes the best thing you can do with a kitchen is simply stand in it, slightly tipsy, making a reasonable mess.

I will be back, I suspect, if only to find out what that Thursday fish man was actually saying.