I have never been so relieved to see a set of traffic cones in my life. There we were, somewhere on the A34 south of Udine, having followed our sat nav with the blind faith usually reserved for horoscopes and weather apps, when the road simply stopped being a road and became what I can only describe as an ambitious gravel track. My partner was gripping the door handle like we were in a rally car. I was doing forty kilometres an hour and sweating like I had run a marathon.

Three hours earlier we had landed at Trieste, collected our hire car, and immediately celebrated with an espresso that cost one euro twenty and tasted better than anything from that chain with the green mermaid. The plan was simple: drive to Lignano, find our holiday home, open wine, eat something. The reality involved a detour through what I am fairly certain was someone's vineyard, a tense negotiation with an angry goose, and the slow realisation that I had packed three novels and no cooking oil.

We found the place eventually, tucked into a quiet corner of Lignano Pineta, all terracotta roof and cream walls and that particular hush that comes from mature pine trees and sensible urban planning. The key was in a lockbox. I dropped it twice. The door opened onto cool tiles and the faint smell of clean linen, and suddenly the gravel track and the goose felt like a story we would laugh about rather than a trauma requiring therapy.

The kitchen was the first thing I properly noticed. Not the view, not the bedrooms, not even the terrace with its promise of evening aperitivi. The kitchen. It was compact but properly equipped, the sort of space that makes you want to roll up your sleeves and attempt something ambitious. There was even a proper gas hob, which in my experience of self-catering places usually means a single ring that takes twelve minutes to boil an egg. I opened the cupboards hopefully. Plates, glasses, a decent knife. No oil, obviously. I had not packed oil. I had packed a hardback about the fall of Constantinople.

We unpacked in that slightly manic way you do when hungry, then drove the five minutes to the centre of Lignano to find supplies. The first supermarket was one of those bright, efficient Italian places where the vegetables look like they have been individually polished and the cheese counter requires a queueing system. I stood before the mozzarella selection with the paralysis of the underprepared. My partner went for prosciutto crudo and I grabbed tomatoes that smelled actually of tomatoes, plus basil in a pot that I immediately named Gerald and vowed to keep alive for the fortnight. Spoiler: Gerald lasted four days.

That first evening we kept it simple. Bruschetta with the good tomatoes, thin slices of prosciutto draped over melon, a bottle of Friulano from the wine section that cost less than a London sandwich and tasted of green apples and somewhere green and peaceful. We ate on the terrace as the light went soft and the pine trees turned black against the sky. I had attempted to cook actual pasta but the gas hob had defeated my patience, so raw ingredients it was, and honestly I have rarely eaten better.

The morning brought the market. Lignano does a proper one, not the tourist trinket variety but a working market where locals buy their vegetables and fish and the occasional kitchen implement of mysterious purpose. We went early, before the heat built, and I immediately became the sort of person who squeezes peaches with unnecessary authority. The fish stall had sardines so fresh they still looked surprised. An old woman explained to me in rapid Italian and expressive hand gestures how to cook them simply, with oil and lemon and nothing else. I understood perhaps every third word but nodded with the enthusiasm of the truly lost.

We bought more than we needed, obviously. Bread from a van that had been baking since four in the morning. Tiny courgettes with their flowers still attached, which I had always considered restaurant affectation but here were simply what was available. A wedge of Montasio cheese that the vendor cut with a wire and wrapped in paper without my asking. My partner carried the bags and did not complain about my peach-squeezing, which is true love in a market context.

Back at the house I attempted my first proper self-catering lunch. The sardines went under the grill. The courgette flowers I tried to stuff with ricotta and batter, following instructions from a website that kept crashing. The result was not beautiful. The batter was too thick in places and too thin in others, and several flowers tore in ways that felt personal. But we ate them anyway, standing at the kitchen counter with our fingers, and they tasted of the market and the morning and something accomplished despite itself.

The proper revelation came that evening with a restaurant meal, because even the keenest self-caterer needs a night off. We walked to a place in Lignano Sabbiadoro, nothing fancy, family-run, the sort where the owner explains the specials like he is sharing secrets. I had frico, that glorious Friulian dish of cheese and potato pressed together until it becomes something greater than its parts, crispy at the edges and yielding in the middle. My partner had a seafood risotto that arrived in a pan and required serious commitment. We drank more Friulano and I thought about how I might attempt frico back at the house, with the Montasio from the market and some patience.

I did attempt it, two nights later. It stuck to the pan in a way that suggested I had missed some crucial technique, probably involving temperature or butter or the correct prayers to the cheese gods. We ate it anyway, scraping the crispy bits with determination, and opened another bottle and agreed that failure in this particular kitchen felt better than success in most others.

The days settled into a rhythm. Morning market or supermarket, depending on energy and how many peaches remained. Lunch of assembled things, bread and cheese and tomatoes that never stopped tasting of actual tomatoes. Evening cooking attempts that ranged from competent pasta with clams to a grilled sea bass that I overconfidently stuffed with herbs and nearly incinerated. The terrace became our dining room. Gerald the basil contributed until his tragic demise, which I blame on overwatering and the general mortality of potted herbs.

On our last morning I made coffee in the little moka pot I had bought at the supermarket, standing in the kitchen with the tiles cool under my feet. The fridge held remnants: half a lemon, the last of the prosciutto, a tomato slightly past its best. I made a final bruschetta and ate it looking out at the pine trees, thinking about the journey here and the gravel track and the goose, and how holiday cooking is never really about the food at all.

We left the leftover Montasio for the cleaners, along with the moka pot and a note of apology about Gerald. The drive back to Trieste was uneventful, sat nav behaving, no angry wildlife. I had packed the novels unread and the empty bottle of Friulano wrapped in a beach towel, a souvenir of sorts. Somewhere on the autostrada my partner asked what I would cook first when we got home, and I honestly could not remember what we used to eat before tomatoes tasted like sunlight and cheese came from people who knew their cows by name.