I have never been so relieved to see a village sign as I was when we finally spotted Roisel after three hours of driving from Calais. The mishap? Well, let us just say my partner's confident "I will sort the sat nav" turned into a forty-five-minute tour of what I can only describe as the back end of nowhere, somewhere near Amiens, because someone had typed "Roisel" but the device had heard "Rosieres." By the time we found the actual place, I had eaten an entire bag of wine gums and developed what can only be called an unhealthy relationship with a French roundabout.

The gite itself was one of those proper Picardy farm conversions, all red brick and steep roofs, with a kitchen that immediately made me want to cook something ambitious. This was, in hindsight, my second mistake of the day. The first was trusting the sat nav, obviously. The second was believing that a British person with a GCSE in French could successfully navigate a Picardy market and then produce something edible.

We dumped our bags and headed straight to the nearest boulangerie, which was in the village centre, about five minutes' walk. The bread was still warm. I mean actually warm, not supermarket "baked today" warm. We bought a baguette that crackled when you squeezed it, which my partner did, repeatedly, like a small child with a crisp packet. Then we found the local butcher, where I attempted to ask for "six saucisses" and somehow ended up with twelve, because I had nodded at the wrong moment and the butcher, being thoroughly French, had interpreted my panic as enthusiasm. We ate sausages for three days. I have no regrets.

That evening, armed with our market haul and a bottle of red from the cave in the next village, I attempted my first proper meal in the gite kitchen. The plan was simple: a rustic tarte flambee, or flammekueche as they call it round here, being so close to the Belgian border. The reality was a smoke alarm, a slightly charred base, and my partner opening every window in the house while wearing an oven glove as a sort of makeshift fan. We ate it on the terrace, slightly crispy, with the rest of the wine, and it was absolutely perfect. There is something about Picardy air, thick with the smell of farmland and proper darkness at night, that makes even burnt dinner taste like a triumph.

The local pub situation, or rather the "estaminet" situation, became our next obsession. There is a proper one in Roisel itself, all dark wood and locals who look like they have been sitting in the same spot since 1987. We went in on our second night, and I made the classic error of trying to order a pint. The barman looked at me with what I can only describe as polite confusion, and my partner, who had actually bothered to look things up, stepped in to request "deux demis." We drank our half-pints like locals, or tried to, and ate carbonnade flamande that had clearly been simmering since approximately last Tuesday. It was rich, beefy, slightly sweet from the beer, and exactly what you want when you have spent the day getting lost and buying too many sausages.

By day three, I had developed what I can only call market fever. The Thursday morning market in Peronne, about four miles away, became our weekly pilgrimage. I bought cheese I could not pronounce, vegetables I did not recognise, and once, disastrously, a rabbit. Whole. With bits still attached. The butcher had asked if I wanted it "prepare," and I, wanting to appear capable, had said "non, merci." I spent forty-five minutes in the gite kitchen with a YouTube video and a very sharp knife, having what I can only describe as an existential crisis about my place in the food chain. We had rabbit stew. It was delicious. I felt slightly guilty. This is, I suppose, the gentle self-reflection part: there is something about cooking in rural France that forces you to confront how squeamish and disconnected we have become, and also how capable you can be when the nearest takeaway is simply not an option.

The gite had a proper dining table, big enough for eight, and by the end of the week we had filled it with the detritus of our culinary experiments: empty wine bottles, cheese rinds, the remains of a tarte au maroilles that I had attempted after a particularly successful market trip. Maroilles, for the uninitiated, is a Picardy cheese that smells like feet but tastes like heaven, and my partner made me keep it in a sealed container on the windowsill, which in August meant it was essentially fermenting in the sun. We ate it with fresh bread and local beer, a blonde from a microbrewery near Saint-Quentin, and argued about whether it was better melted on tart or just smeared directly onto bread like a sort of sophisticated plaster.

Our final night, we returned to the estaminet, defeated by our own ambition, and let someone else do the cooking. I had the chicons au gratin, endive wrapped in ham and smothered in cheese sauce, which is basically the national dish of this part of the world and should be adopted immediately by Britain. My partner had the potjevleesch, a sort of meat jelly situation that I initially mocked and then spent the entire meal stealing from his plate. We drank too much genievre, a local juniper spirit that tastes like gin's aggressive cousin, and walked home slightly unsteadily through lanes that smelled of cut grass and cow manure.

I came back from Roisel three pounds heavier and significantly more confident with a French cheese knife, which is not something I expected to write at the start of the summer.