I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I tried to fill the hire car with diesel at Roscoff and realised I'd been pumping unleaded for a good thirty seconds. The petrol station bloke looked at me with that particular blend of pity and amusement that only the French can really nail. Still, we made it to Plougonvelin in one piece, albeit with me white-knuckling the steering wheel and muttering apologies to the engine for the foreseeable future.

The cottage sat at the end of a narrow lane, all weathered stone and blue shutters, with a garden that smelled of gorse and salt. My partner unfolded from the car, stretched, and immediately announced they were starving. This would become the defining theme of our week.

We'd planned to cook properly, you see. The kitchen was genuinely lovely - big range cooker, wooden worktops, the sort of space that makes you believe you might actually become the sort of person who prepares moules mariniere from scratch. Our first evening, we unpacked the provisions we'd grabbed from a Super U in Brest: local butter, a hefty chunk of Breton pork, some sad-looking lettuce I'd optimistically thrown in for health reasons.

I attempted a galettes completes situation. The buckwheat flour and I had what I can only describe as a fundamental disagreement about texture. My first effort crumbled like a failed sandcastle. The second stuck to the pan with the determination of a limpet. By the third, I'd achieved something vaguely circular, filled it with ham and cheese, and presented it with the defiant pride of a man who knows his standards have slipped but refuses to acknowledge it. My partner ate it kindly and said it was "rustic," which is relationship code for "we're never speaking of this again."

The next morning, we found the market at Saint-Renan. This is where I should have started, frankly. Stall after stall of proper Breton produce - oysters still dripping seawater, crabs with their aggressive little legs tied up, vegetables that actually looked like they'd been pulled from the earth that morning rather than engineered in a warehouse. I bought far too much, as one does, including a pot of far breton that I nibbled at while wandering between stalls, getting custard powder on my jacket like a complete amateur.

That evening, defeated by my own culinary ambitions, we walked to the nearest bar-tabac in Plougonvelin proper. It was one of those brilliantly unpretentious places where the beer is cold, the cider is brut, and the menu runs to galettes, crepes, and not much else. I had a galette saucisse that was everything my homemade effort hadn't been - crisp, savoury, the sausage snapping properly when I bit in. My partner went for a seafood crepe that arrived absolutely loaded with tiny pink prawns and a cream sauce I kept stealing forkfuls of. We drank local cider, brut and earthy, and watched an old chap at the bar argue about football with the owner in rapid Breton French that I understood perhaps one word in ten of.

The following days settled into a rhythm of attempted cooking and strategic surrender. I managed a respectable moules frites on our third evening, largely because mussels basically cook themselves if you steam them with shallots, cider, and a bit of cream, and even I struggle to ruin that entirely. We ate them at the garden table with a baguette that had gone slightly stale because I'd bought it at eight in the morning and forgotten that French bread has the shelf life of a mayfly. Dipped in the mussel liquor, though, it was perfect.

We found another proper restaurant down towards the port, nothing fancy, just a room with checked tablecloths and a chalkboard menu. I had the cotriade, that Breton fish stew, which arrived in a bowl big enough to bathe a small dog, loaded with monkfish and langoustines and potatoes that had soaked up all the good stuff. My partner had some kind of grilled sole that the waiter filleted at the table with the casual expertise of someone who's done it ten thousand times. We drank Muscadet, because when in Rome, and staggered home full and slightly tight, arguing about whether we could justify buying a house in Brittany that we'd use approximately eleven days a year.

The market became our Saturday ritual. I got better at not overbuying, though I never quite mastered it. There was always some cheese that demanded to come home with us, some saucisse seche that we'd nibble while preparing dinner, some vegetable that looked interesting and would later languish in the fridge while we went out for crepes instead. I attempted a kouign-amann once, using a recipe I'd found in a book at the cottage. The butter leaked everywhere, the sugar caramelised into something between toffee and tar, and we ended up scraping the remains into the bin while opening another bottle of cider and admitting that some things are best left to professionals.

Our final evening, we returned to that first bar-tabac. Same table, roughly. Same brut cider. I had another galette saucisse, partly because it was genuinely delicious and partly, I think, as a quiet acknowledgment of my limitations. My partner had a crepe with salted caramel that arrived properly drenched, the caramel still warm, pooling on the plate. We walked back slowly, full in that particular way that only comes from a week of eating too well, slightly sad to be leaving, already planning what we'd cook "properly" next time, knowing full well that we'd end up at the same bar, at the same table, making the same excellent decisions all over again.