I have never been so happy to see a sat nav give up on me as I was somewhere between Ancona and the middle of absolutely nowhere. We had been winding through the Marche countryside for the best part of an hour, my other half insisting he knew a shortcut, and me insisting that a twenty-four-year-old Fiat Panda did not do shortcuts. The mishap came at a T-junction near a field of very judgmental sheep, where Mark confidently turned left, straight into what turned out to be someone's olive grove. Not a road. Not even close. Three-point turn became twelve-point turn. The sheep watched in silence. I ate the last of the airport biscuits and contemplated my life choices.

By the time we actually found the place in Offida, I was ready to eat my own shoe. But then we climbed out of the car, and there it was: a proper stone farmhouse with a view that made me forget I had just spent forty minutes of my life reversing past olive trees. The owner, a lovely woman called Luisa, appeared with a bottle of her own wine and a look that suggested she had seen this exact scene a hundred times before. She showed us round the kitchen first, which I now realise was strategic. It was the kind of kitchen that makes you want to cook immediately, all terracotta tiles and a wooden table that had clearly hosted decades of long lunches.

The first thing I did was open the fridge, which is apparently my love language. Luisa had left us a chunk of pecorino, some local salami, and a jar of something orange that turned out to be mostarda di Cremona's distant, more interesting cousin. I ate the salami standing up, leaning against the counter, while Mark tried to figure out the coffee maker. We had planned to go out for dinner that night. Instead I made a meal of bread, cheese, and that mysterious orange preserve, which was sweet and fiery and completely addictive. We sat on the terrace until it got dark, drinking Luisa's wine and not talking much, which is always the sign of a good holiday beginning.

The next morning I was up early, possessed by some strange culinary ambition. The local market in Offida happens on Saturdays, and I had decided I was going to cook a proper lunch. I walked down into town with a basket like a woman in a film, except I got lost twice and the basket was actually a plastic bag from the car. The market was brilliant chaos. An old man selling nothing but artichokes, enormous ones with spiky leaves that looked like weapons. A woman with wheels of cheese you could smell from three stalls away. I bought too much of everything, as always, including some fresh pasta that I had absolutely no plan for.

Back at the house, I attempted to recreate something I had once eaten in a restaurant in Soho. The artichokes became a disaster. I had never prepared them from scratch before, and I spent forty-five minutes wrestling with leaves and a choke that seemed personally offended by my existence. Mark wandered in, made a supportive noise, and wandered out again. The pasta was meant to be vincisgrassi, which is basically lasagne's more sophisticated relative from this part of the world, but I had bought the wrong sort of pasta sheets and the ragu took three hours longer than I anticipated. By the time it was ready, we were starving and slightly drunk on more of Luisa's wine, which I had opened out of stress.

It was, honestly, a bit of a mess. The artichokes were chewy. The pasta was slightly underdone in the middle. But we ate it on that terrace as the sun went down, and I felt genuinely proud of myself in a way I rarely do. There is something about cooking badly in a beautiful place that feels more honest than cooking well at home. I had tried. The ingredients were incredible even if my execution was not.

The rest of the week became a sort of delicious routine. Morning trips to the market or the local alimentari, where a man called Franco slowly taught me the names of things I had been pointing at. Afternoons of cooking with varying degrees of success. One evening I made brodetto, the local fish stew, using a recipe I found in a book in the house that had no quantities and seemed to assume I knew what I was doing. It was thin and slightly aggressive, but we ate it with bread and felt very regional.

I did not become a brilliant cook that week. But I did become someone who thinks about food differently, who understands that a perfect tomato in Marche needs absolutely nothing done to it, and that my attempts to complicate things usually end in edible but unnecessary stress. On our last night, Luisa brought us a bottle of Passerina and some olive oil from her family's trees. I made the simplest thing I could manage: bread, cheese, that same salami from the first night, tomatoes with salt and oil. It was the best meal of the holiday. Sometimes you have to cook badly to remember that eating well is mostly about letting good things be what they are.