I have never been so grateful to see a goat in all my life. There I was, white-knuckling the hire car up what I can only describe as a glorified mule track above Rapallo, convinced I had taken a wrong turn somewhere back near the autostrada. My phone had given up the ghost ten minutes earlier, and my partner Sarah was doing that thing where she goes very quiet and stares fixedly out the window. Then round a hairpin bend we spotted a goat, then another, and finally a hand-painted sign that read "Tribogna" with an arrow pointing towards what looked like the edge of civilisation itself.

The property, when we finally found it, turned out to be a stone farmhouse clinging to the hillside like a determined barnacle. The key was in a lockbox, which I promptly dropped down a drainage gully while trying to juggle three bags of groceries from the Conad supermarket in Chiavari. Sarah's look said everything. I fished it out with a twig, feeling about twelve years old and not in a good way.

But then we stepped inside, and the whole world shifted. Terracotta floors, a kitchen with an actual fireplace, and a view down the valley that made my knees go slightly wobbly. Sarah opened the shutters and just said "blimey" very softly, which from her counts as poetry.

Within an hour I had appointed myself head chef, a decision born entirely of hubris and the exceptional local produce weighing down our bags. I had gone slightly mad in that Conad, dazzled by the unfamiliar packaging and the fact that everything seemed to cost roughly half what it would at home. There was pesto from Genoa, obviously, though I told myself I would make my own later to prove something. Fresh trofie pasta, plump anchovies in oil, artichokes the size of a child's fist, and a wedge of toma cheese that smelled properly of somewhere.

That first evening I attempted something I called "Ligurian rustic" which was essentially pasta with whatever I could chop quickly while drinking a glass of Pigato that cost embarrassingly little. The trofie went into a pan of water that took approximately six years to boil on the slightly temperamental hob. I bashed together basil, pine nuts, garlic and olive oil with more enthusiasm than technique, using a mortar and pestle I found in a cupboard that smelled reassuringly of dried herbs. The result was frankly magnificent, or at least it seemed so after the journey and the wine and the sheer relief of not having driven off a cliff.

The next morning we walked down to Tribogna village, a descent that took twenty minutes and would take us forty-five sweaty minutes to climb back up. There is a small alimentari there, the kind where the owner cuts cheese with a wire and knows the provenance of everything. I bought focaccia still warm from the oven, proper Ligurian style, thin and oily and scattered with salt. The woman behind the counter wrapped it in paper without my asking, and I carried it like a holy relic back up the hill.

I became obsessed with that kitchen. Each day brought a new market or shop to raid. We drove to Chiavari on market day, Thursday, and I lost Sarah for twenty minutes because she had found a stall selling nothing but dried mushrooms and I had become trapped in conversation with an elderly man selling his own olive oil. He made me taste three different pressings, watching my face with the intensity of a poker player, and I bought the middle one out of sheer nervousness. It was extraordinary, grassy and peppery and nothing like the yellow stuff we get at home.

My cooking ambitions expanded dangerously. I attempted stuffed vegetables one evening, using a recipe I found in a battered cookbook left in the property. The artichokes defeated me entirely; I had never prepared them fresh and made a right mess of the trimming, ending up with what looked like vegetable carnage and yielding perhaps two edible mouthfuls per plant. Sarah was kind about it in that way that makes you feel worse. We ate bread and cheese for supper and laughed until our stomachs hurt.

The anchovies became my triumph. Simple, grilled, with lemon and the local olive oil, eaten on the terrace as the light faded and the valley filled with shadows. I made pesto properly on our last day, with basil from the village shop, and understood finally why this region claims it. The mortar and pestle had taught me something, though I could not articulate what. Perhaps just that some things resist shortcuts, that effort and patience have their own flavour.

On our final morning I stood in that kitchen with my coffee, looking at the remains of our supplies: half a lemon, some ageing focaccia, a smear of pesto in its jar. The fridge held only a bottle of white wine we had not managed to finish. I felt an unexpected sadness, not at leaving the place itself, though I would miss the view and the quiet and the goats. It was something about the temporary life we had built there, the small daily rituals of shopping and cooking and eating together, the way a kitchen in a strange place can become familiar faster than almost anything else.

Sarah found me staring at an artichoke I had bought and not yet attempted, now slightly past its best. "Last supper?" she asked. I braised it badly, we ate it anyway, and it tasted of the whole holiday, of effort and imperfection and the particular joy of feeding yourself in a place that knows what food ought to be.