I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I got us lost before we'd even left the ferry terminal. There we were, two hours off the boat from Puttgarden, sat in a hire car outside a Netto in Odense that definitely wasn't on any route to Horne. My partner, ever patient, just kept saying "we'll laugh about this later" in that tone that suggested later might be several years away. Google Maps had decided to have a little lie-down, and my Danish pronunciation of place names was apparently offensive enough that even the locals looked confused when I asked for directions.

We found Horne Sommerland eventually, down a lane that felt properly rural without being so remote that you start worrying about the plot of a Scandinavian crime drama unfolding. The property itself was one of those traditional Danish summer houses, all wood panelling and big windows looking out towards proper countryside. I immediately planned to cook magnificent meals in that kitchen, imagining myself as some sort of Nordic culinary genius, perhaps finally mastering the art of smorrebrod or at least not burning toast.

The first evening, we walked to the village shop in Horne, which stocked the essentials and not much else. I bought some local pork sausages, a loaf of rugbrod that weighed approximately the same as a house brick, and what I thought was butter but turned out to be some kind of very assertive cheese spread. Dinner was... educational. The sausages were magnificent, properly herby and dense, but my attempt to serve them with a "rustic" potato salad went wrong when I discovered the hob worked differently to ours at home and everything took twice as long. We ate at half past nine, slightly drunk on the local beer I'd picked up, which was probably for the best given the state of those potatoes.

The next morning, I was determined to do better. We drove to Svendborg market, about twenty minutes south, which sets up on Wednesdays and Saturdays near the harbour. It's the real sort of market, not the tourist kind with overpriced olive wood chopping boards. I bought fresh fish from a man who spoke better English than I do Danish, which is not saying much, and vegetables from a stall where an elderly woman explained very slowly, as if to a child, that I was holding a squash and not a pumpkin. I took this with good grace. We also found a bakery doing proper Danish pastries, the laminated kind that shatter when you bite them, filled with almond paste and custard. I ate two standing up by the harbour, watching the little boats, feeling genuinely content in a way that only happens on holiday when you've temporarily forgotten your own incompetence.

That evening I cooked the fish simply, with butter and dill from a pot I'd bought at the market, plus new potatoes boiled and rolled in more butter because when in Denmark, apparently. It was probably the best thing I cooked all week, which says less about my skills and more about the quality of the ingredients. We opened a bottle of wine and sat on the terrace as the light went, and I thought about how I'd started the trip lost in a supermarket car park and somehow ended up here, slightly sunburned and very full, pretending I could live this life permanently.

We found a proper pub in Svendborg too, down near the old shipyard area, doing simple food and local craft beers. Not a gastropub, thank goodness, just a place with worn wooden tables and a bartender who remembered us when we went back. I ate a burger that was almost embarrassingly good, thick and pink in the middle, with a sauce I couldn't identify and didn't try to. My partner had fish and chips, which felt almost traitorous given where we were, but the fish was local plaice and the chips were proper thick-cut ones, so even that felt somehow Danish by the end.

The rest of the week blurred into a pleasant rhythm of market visits, cooking attempts of varying success, and walks to work up appetites. I made a terrible risotto with some local mushrooms I hadn't properly identified. We ate bread and cheese for lunch most days, sitting outside the summer house, watching birds I couldn't name. One evening we walked to a nearby farm shop and bought eggs with feathers still stuck to them, which felt authentic in a way that supermarket eggs never do.

By the end, I'd abandoned any pretence of culinary ambition and was simply enjoying the food as it came, good ingredients treated simply, eaten slowly. We stopped at the same bakery on the way back to the ferry, loading up with pastries for the journey, and I didn't get lost once on the return trip. Progress, of a sort.