I have never been so grateful to see a cheese board in my entire life. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The drive up to Lamon from Venice was supposed to take two and a half hours. It took four, partly because I kept stopping for espresso, and partly because I decided my sat nav was "being dramatic" about the mountain roads. It was not being dramatic. I found this out somewhere near Feltre when I took what I thought was a scenic shortcut and ended up on a track so narrow that a goat looked at me with genuine pity. By the time I reached the property, I had sweated through my shirt, developed an irrational hatred of hairpin bends, and was fantasising about plain pasta with nothing on it. Just the pasta and a chair.

The house itself sits in the sort of valley that makes you forget your own name. Green slopes, wooden balconies, that particular Alpine hush that feels almost rude to break. I stumbled out of the car, grabbed my bags, and immediately dropped my phone down a drainage grate. This was the mishap. It did not seem funny at the time. It seems slightly funny now, three days later, after the local builder fished it out with a bit of wire and I bought him three beers. The phone worked fine. My dignity did not.

I had planned, in that organised way you do before a self-catering holiday, to cook properly. Local ingredients, rustic Italian meals, perhaps a handwritten recipe or two. The reality of my first evening was rather different. The nearest supermarket in Lamon village closes at half past six, a fact I discovered at quarter to seven. I stood outside like a man who has just missed his own wedding, peering through the shutters at shelves of pasta I could not reach. There was nothing for it. I drove to the one bar still open and ate a panino the size of my head, filled with speck and asiago and something pickled I chose not to identify. I drank two glasses of local red and told myself this was cultural research.

The next morning I was outside the supermarket at eight, slightly hungover, slightly desperate. This is how I found the Thursday market, which I had not known existed and which turned out to be the making of my entire trip. Three stalls, perhaps, but what stalls. A woman selling eggs with the feathers still stuck to them. A man with fontina cheese that smelled like feet in the most complimentary way possible. Bunches of radicchio so purple they looked edited. I bought too much of everything, which is the only way to buy at a market, and drove back to the house with my passenger seat full of vegetables and my head full of plans.

The kitchen at the property is one of those practical Alpine affairs, all wood and decent knives and a stove that actually works. I spent that first proper day cooking with the seriousness of a man trying to prove something. Polenta, because you cannot come to this part of the Dolomites and not. I stirred it for forty minutes, which I now understand is the minimum, not the maximum. My arm ached. The polenta was thick enough to stand a spoon in. I grilled some of that fontina on top, added the market radicchio, and ate it on the balcony watching the light change on the mountains. It was not sophisticated. It was better than sophisticated.

I have attempted various things since. A mushroom risotto with porcini I found at a farm shop near Sovramonte, which involved me talking to an old man for twenty minutes in a mixture of broken Italian and enthusiastic pointing. He kept saying "basta" and I kept not understanding that he meant I had bought enough, more than enough, please stop filling my bag. The risotto was excellent. I have made speck and bean soup that thickened overnight into something almost architectural. I have failed at making gnocchi, which turned out like little flour bullets, and succeeded at simply boiling good potatoes with butter and parsley, which needed no success beyond the quality of the potatoes themselves.

The local eating places, when I have ventured out, have been unshowy and excellent. A trattoria in Lamon village where I ate cjarsons, those strange stuffed pasta parcels with spinach and raisins and a hint of cinnamon, sweet and savoury in a way that sounds wrong until it is in your mouth. The owner asked if I wanted the butter or the smoked ricotta on top. I said both, because I am not a coward, and I was correct. Another evening I found myself in a slightly further spot, I will not say where because I am sticking to my brief, eating grilled trout that had been swimming that morning and polenta that had been stirring for longer than I had been sitting there.

What I have learned, I suppose, and here comes the gentle reflection I promised myself I would include, is that self-catering in a place like this is not about cooking well. It is about cooking at all, with what is around you, with the slight panic of markets that close too early and ingredients you do not recognise. It is about the builder who rescued your phone and the egg woman and the mushroom man who thought you were greedy. It is about eating fontina on a balcony at six in the evening because the light is good and you are hungry and there is nowhere else you need to be.

I still have half a wheel of cheese in the fridge. I do not know how I will get it home. I suspect I will simply eat it, in thin slices, standing at the kitchen counter, watching the mountains do nothing in particular. This seems like the right way to end a holiday. This seems like the only way.