I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I tried to put diesel in a petrol hire car at Turin airport. The attendant, a chap with the patience of a saint and the expressive eyebrows of a disappointed uncle, wagged his finger and pointed me to the correct pump with the kind of weary efficiency that suggested he'd seen this dance before. I smiled, he sighed, and we both pretended I hadn't just nearly ruined a Fiat 500.

The drive to Madonna Del Sasso Boleto took us through Piedmont's rolling countryside, all misty vineyards and sudden valleys that made me grip the steering wheel rather tighter than necessary. By the time we spotted the property, perched above Lake Orta with views that made me actually say "blimey" out loud, I was ready for a sit-down and a very large drink.

The villa itself was exactly the sort of place that makes you feel slightly inadequate as a cook. Spacious kitchen, proper gas hob, a terrace practically begging for long lunches. I unpacked our shopping with the optimism of the truly deluded. We'd stopped at a market in Omegna, about ten minutes down the road, where I'd got overexcited by the sheer abundance of it all. Local cheeses I couldn't pronounce, salami that smelled like it contained actual magic, tomatoes that tasted of something other than refrigerated disappointment. I filled two bags, spent far too much, and forgot to buy anything that might constitute an actual meal.

That first evening, I attempted something I called "Piedmontese-inspired." It involved tajarin pasta, which I'd bought because the woman at the deli had looked so approving when I pointed at it, and a sauce made from those magnificent tomatoes, garlic, and a local olive oil that cost more than my first car. I burnt the garlic within four minutes. The tomatoes, which had seemed so cooperative in the market, refused to break down into anything resembling a sauce. My partner watched from the doorway with the expression of someone witnessing a slow-motion accident.

"Perhaps less heat," she offered, which is marital code for "what on earth are you doing."

We ate it anyway, on that terrace, with a bottle of Gattinara I'd picked up from a tiny enoteca in the village. The wine was extraordinary, all earthy and complex, and somehow made my culinary disaster taste almost intentional. The sun went down over the lake, the swallows did their evening dance, and I decided that perhaps being a mediocre cook in a beautiful place was vastly superior to being competent anywhere else.

The next morning, I was up early and determined. The Omegna market runs twice weekly, and I arrived with a list, a sensible hat, and a newfound humility. An elderly woman selling porcini mushrooms took pity on me, or perhaps recognised the desperation in my eyes. She showed me how to check for worms, which is not a sentence I ever expected to write in a holiday context, and sold me a paper bag of fungi that smelled like autumn itself.

Back at the villa, I made a risotto. Arborio rice, local butter that was practically yellow with richness, white wine from a vineyard we could see across the valley, and those porcini, sliced and fried until they were crisp at the edges. I stirred for twenty-three minutes, which I know because I timed it obsessively, and added stock ladle by ladle like a man performing a religious ritual. It was, against all reasonable expectation, genuinely good. Creamy without being stodgy, earthy, deeply savoury in that way that makes you close your eyes involuntarily.

We ate it for lunch with nothing else except bread to scrape the plate, and I felt disproportionately proud of myself. This is the thing about self-catering in a place like this. The ingredients do so much of the work that you start to believe, however briefly, that you might actually know what you're doing.

The villa's barbecue saw heavy use that week. Local sausages, butterflied and charred, served with peperonata I'd made from fat yellow peppers and slow-cooked onions. Fresh lake fish from a morning market in Orta San Giulio, simply grilled with lemon and herbs from a pot on the terrace that I definitely didn't overwater into near-death. One evening, I attempted bagna cauda, that anchovy-garlic dip that is essentially Piedmont in edible form. The kitchen smelled intensely of garlic for approximately three days afterwards. Worth it, though, for the way we sat dipping raw vegetables into warm, pungent oil as the light faded.

I became slightly obsessed with the local cheese shop, a tiny place in Madonna del Sasso itself where the proprietor would let me taste things and then watch, amused, as I bought far more than any sensible person needed. Toma, robiola, a castelmagno that was so sharp it made my eyes water. I'd return to the villa with my spoils, arrange them on a board with honey and walnuts, and pretend this was a perfectly normal lunch rather than an act of glorious excess.

By the end of the week, my cooking had improved marginally, or perhaps I'd simply learned which dishes to attempt and which to leave to professionals. We ate out twice, once at a trattoria in Orta where the owner made me try risotto with perch from the lake, and once at a place in Boleto where they did something extraordinary with rabbit that I still think about on rainy Tuesdays.

But mostly, we cooked. We shopped, we planned, we failed and occasionally succeeded. The kitchen at Madonna Del Sasso Boleto became the centre of the holiday in a way I hadn't expected. There's something about preparing food in a place where the ingredients have actual flavour, where the olive oil comes from trees you can see from the window, where the wine is made by someone who probably shops at the same market. It connects you to a place in a way that restaurant meals, however excellent, simply cannot.

On our final morning, I made one last market run for bread and cheese to sustain us on the drive back. The same elderly mushroom woman was there, and she asked, in gestures and broken English, how the risotto had gone. I gave her a thumbs up, which felt inadequate, so I bought more porcini I didn't need. She wrapped them carefully, patted my hand, and sent me off with the satisfied look of a teacher whose hopeless student had finally, against the odds, produced something passable.

I drove away from Madonna Del Sasso Boleto with porcini in the boot, a slightly expanded waistline, and the certain knowledge that my kitchen at home would never feel quite the same again.