I have never been so happy to see a dry stone wall in my life. After seventeen hours of travel that started with a 4am dash to Gatwick and included a hire car with suspicious air conditioning, we finally found our Salento farmhouse. Or rather, we found the lane that might lead to it. The sat nav had given up three kilometres back, and my partner Mark was doing that slow British drive where you peer at gateposts hoping for a house number while pretending you are definitely not lost.

The mishap came at the final bend. I had spotted a fig tree heavy with fruit and, in my excitement at finally seeing something recognisably Mediterranean, I flung open the car door straight into a low stone wall. The door did not bounce. It made a sound like a tin can being slowly crushed. I stood there in the dust, holding a warm fig I had absentmindedly picked, staring at the dent. Mark said nothing for a full ten seconds. Then he laughed, which was worse.

The farmhouse itself saved the mood entirely. It was everything the photos promised and nothing like them too, which is the trick of these places. The photos had shown a swimming pool and whitewashed walls, sure. They had not captured the smell of jasmine that hit you the moment you stepped from the car, or the absolute silence broken only by cicadas and, presently, me swearing at a stubborn shutter. The kitchen was the heart of it, a long room with terracotta floors and a fireplace you could stand in, plus a wooden table that looked like it had hosted four generations of arguments about olive oil.

We had planned to eat out constantly. This was Puglia, after all. But the kitchen had other ideas. Within an hour of arrival, I found myself at the local alimentari in the nearest village, which was less a shop and more someone's front room that happened to sell cheese. The woman behind the counter spoke no English and I speak restaurant Italian at best, which meant I accidentally bought three times the intended amount of burrata. She seemed pleased. I was too flustered to correct her. We ate burrata for three days.

The market in Galatina, held Tuesday mornings, became our weekly pilgrimage. I use the word pilgrimage deliberately because we approached it with the solemnity of religious converts. The vegetables arrived still warm from the fields, tomatoes that actually tasted of something, peppers like small lanterns. I bought artichokes without the faintest idea how to prepare them, which Mark pointed out as we walked back to the car with our paper bags. I told him I would look it up. I did not look it up. They sat in the fridge for a week until I admitted defeat and took them back to the market to ask the stallholder, who demonstrated with the patience of someone who has watched many foreigners ruin perfectly good vegetables.

My cooking attempts became the running theme of the fortnight. I made orecchiette with cime di rapa that was, by any objective standard, a failure. The pasta was chewy, the greens bitter, the garlic burned. We ate it on the terrace with a five euro Primitivo and it tasted, in that moment, like the best meal I had ever made. The next night I tried again. It was worse. We went out for pizza.

The pizzeria in the village did not have a menu in English. This was how we discovered that "friarielli" meant something wonderful with broccoli rabe and sausage, and that asking for "the one with the potatoes" would get you a confused look because several pizzas had potatoes and this was apparently a normal thing that did not require special mention. We went back four times. The owner started recognising us and would appear with bread and oil before we asked, which I chose to interpret as affection rather than pity.

Back at the farmhouse, I developed a strange relationship with the outdoor grill. It was a simple brick construction that looked like it had been built by someone's uncle in 1987, which it probably had. I could not light it properly. Mark could light it but not control it. Between us we produced food that was either raw or carbonised, with no middle ground. One evening we grilled local sausages that caught fire so dramatically I had to douse them with a watering can. We ate them anyway, standing by the pool in our swimming costumes, drinking Negroamaro and watching the bats come out.

The self-catering fantasy, I realised about a week in, was not about replicating restaurant meals. It was about the slow accumulation of small disasters and small triumphs. The morning I finally made a proper caffe in the moka pot without it sputtering and dying. The afternoon I successfully asked for "un etto" of prosciutto and received roughly the correct amount. The evening we ate nothing but bread, oil, and tomatoes from the garden, and it was enough.

On our last day I went back to the alimentari for more burrata, partly for the journey home and partly because I wanted to say goodbye. The woman was not there. A younger man served me, and I managed the transaction in Italian that was probably painful to hear but functional. He wrapped the cheese in paper without being asked. I walked back to the farmhouse along the lane where I had dented the car door, past the fig tree now looking picked-over and sorry for itself.

We ate the burrata that evening with the last of the wine, watching the sun drop behind the olive groves. Mark said we should come back. I said we would definitely hire a smaller car. We sat there until the mosquitoes drove us inside, and I did not think once about the artichokes I had failed to cook, or the orecchiette that had defeated me, or any of it. The kitchen was warm. The fridge held leftovers. Somewhere in the dark, a dog barked at nothing. I was already planning what I would attempt to cook next time, and whether I might finally learn what to do with an artichoke before I got there.