I should have known the sat-nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me through what looked like someone's vineyard. There I was, winding up through the Piedmont hills in a hire car the size of a small boat, convinced I was about to become the first person in history to get a Fiat Tipo stuck in a Nebbiolo grape trellis. The gravel track grew narrower, the olive branches scraped the windows, and my other half sat there with that particular expression that said "I trusted you with the directions" without actually needing to speak.

We were aiming for Pozzol Groppo, a converted farmhouse tucked into the hills above the Tortona area, and by the time we finally spotted the stone walls and terracotta roof through the cypress trees, I was ready to kiss the ground. Though I settled for kissing the bottle of local Dolcetto I'd bought at a petrol station in panic.

The owners had left us a proper welcome basket, which in my experience usually means a sad packet of biscuits and a leaflet about recycling. Not here. There was a fat wheel of Castelmagno cheese sweating gently in wax paper, a cloth bag of fresh tajarin pasta, and a jar of white truffle cream that I immediately wanted to marry. I stood in the rustic kitchen with its terracotta floors and ancient wooden beams, holding that jar like Gollum with his precious, already planning our first self-catering attempt.

That first evening, we kept things simple. Or so we thought. I had this grand idea of making a straightforward bagna cauda, the warm anchovy and garlic dip that Piedmont does so beautifully. How hard could melting butter and garlic be? Very hard, apparently, when you get distracted by the sunset over the hills and return to find something that smelled like a fisherman's boot had caught fire. We scraped the burnt offering into the bin, laughed until our ribs hurt, and ended up eating the cheese, some bread, and the entire jar of truffle cream with a spoon. Sometimes the best meals are the ones you don't plan.

The morning market in Tortona became our church. We'd drive down through the mist, me still half-asleep, to wander between stalls heaped with produce that actually smelled of something. I bought artichokes the size of my fist from a woman who explained three different ways to prepare them, none of which I properly understood but all of which I nodded earnestly about. There were bunches of plump porcini mushrooms, strings of fat salami, and hazelnuts everywhere because this is Piedmont and hazelnuts are basically a religion here. I spent twenty minutes chatting with a baker about the proper fermentation time for grissini breadsticks, knowledge I have never needed before or since but now possess with the confidence of a man who thinks he knows something.

Back at Pozzol Groppo, the kitchen became my laboratory and occasionally my crime scene. I attempted vitello tonnato one afternoon, poaching veal and whipping up the tuna sauce with the kind of concentration I usually reserve for tax returns. It was edible. That is the highest praise I will give myself. The tajarin pasta, though, that was where I found my groove. Those thin, egg-rich strands cook in minutes, and tossed with butter and a proper shaving of fresh white truffle from a market splurge, I produced something that made my other half actually stop scrolling on their phone mid-bite. A miracle.

We ate outside on the terrace most evenings, watching the light change over the hills, drinking Barbera that cost less than a London pint and tasted like bottled happiness. The self-catering disasters faded into funny stories. The burnt bagna cauda, the risotto that somehow became porridge, the time I mistook a very expensive cheese for cooking mozzarella and melted it into something unholy. Each mistake meant another trip to the market, another conversation with a local who found my Italian charmingly catastrophic, another meal that brought us closer to understanding why people in this part of the world treat eating as something between an art form and a spiritual practice.

By the end of the week, my trousers were tight, my confidence in the kitchen had grown from nothing to something modest but genuine, and I had developed what I can only describe as an emotional attachment to the local butcher who always threw in extra lardo "for flavour." I left Pozzol Groppo with a notebook full of half-legible recipes, a boot full of wine and cheese, and the certain knowledge that I would never again attempt to make bagna cauda without setting a timer. Some lessons you learn the hard way, preferably with a good view and better company.