I'll write this article about a stay at Ballabio Lago Di Como, focusing on food, local eating, and self-catering cooking attempts, with a funny mishap during arrival.

The sat nav had been threatening to quit on me since Milan, and it finally gave up the ghost somewhere between Lecco and Ballabio, leaving me navigating by instinct and a crumpled paper map I'd nicked from the airport. I took a wrong turn, ended up on a road barely wide enough for a Vespa, and found myself face to face with a very unimpressed goat. After a twenty-minute standoff and some undignified reversing, I finally spotted the property down a cobbled lane, heartily relieved and slightly shaken.

The first thing I did, naturally, was head to the kitchen. I'd grand plans of cooking my way through Lombardy, and the kitchen at the house looked promising enough - decent hob, a fridge that actually worked, and a view of the lake that made even washing up feel cinematic. I dumped my bags, grabbed my reusable bags, and marched down to Ballabio's weekly market with the confidence of someone who absolutely could not speak Italian beyond "grazie" and "due birre, per favore."

The market was an absolute revelation. Stalls heaving with local cheeses - taleggio, bitto, that glorious semi-stinky stuff that smells like feet but tastes like heaven. I bought far too much, naturally, swayed by an elderly woman who simply wouldn't let me leave without trying her homemade salami. I nodded enthusiastically through a ten-minute explanation of curing methods, understanding perhaps three words total, and walked away with enough cured meat to feed a small village.

That evening, my first self-catering attempt, I decided to keep it simple. Risotto, I thought. How hard could risotto be? I'd watched enough cooking programmes. I had decent arborio rice, local stock, some of that taleggio. Forty minutes later, I had something that resembled wallpaper paste more than anything Antonio Carlucci would recognise. The cheese had seized. The rice was somehow both crunchy and mushy. I ate it anyway, standing at the kitchen counter, drinking a bottle of Valpolicella I'd picked up, and had a proper word with myself about culinary hubris.

The next morning, slightly humbled, I found a small alimentari run by a chap called Marco who spoke excellent English and took visible pity on me. He talked me through proper risotto technique, sold me the right rice, and threw in some local porcini with a knowing look. "You try again," he said. It wasn't a suggestion.

I did try again. It was better. Not brilliant, but recognisably risotto. I celebrated by eating the entire pan myself, followed by a walk down to the lake that was more of a waddle. The following days settled into a glorious rhythm of market mornings, cooking experiments, and the occasional restorative trip to a local trattoria when my own efforts became too depressing.

I discovered the joy of polenta, that stubborn cornmeal porridge that demands patience I don't naturally possess. I made decent ossobuco after Marco talked me through it, and one genuinely excellent simple pasta with butter and sage that I still think about. I also made one catastrophic attempt at frying local lake fish that set off the smoke alarm and required opening every window in the house during a thunderstorm.

By the end of the week, my Italian hadn't improved much, but my cooking had. More importantly, I'd learned to shop like a local, to ask questions, to accept that failure is just part of feeding yourself in a foreign kitchen. I left Ballabio with a suitcase stuffed with cheese, a notebook full of Marco's scrawled recipes, and the certain knowledge that I'd be back - sat nav or no sat nav.