I have never been more grateful for a sat nav than I was trying to find our Stintino holiday let. We had flown into Alghero, picked up a hire car that smelled faintly of lemons and regret, and set off north with the sort of confidence that only comes from having watched one YouTube video. The villa itself was meant to be simple to find. It was not. We ended up down a dirt track, then another, then somehow in a field with several goats who looked deeply unimpressed. My partner was navigating. I was driving. Neither of us was speaking by the time we finally spotted the proper turning, tucked behind a bend with a faded sign pointing toward the sea.

The villa was a low, whitewashed building with terracotta roof tiles and a small garden that had clearly given up on being tidy sometime in the late nineties. We dumped our bags, flung open the shutters, and were met with that particular silence you only get when you are very near the coast but not quite on it. You could smell the sea though. That briny, promising smell that makes you immediately hungry.

Which brings me to the real point of this trip. We had come to eat. The self-catering kitchen was compact, with tiled countertops and a gas hob that required matches and a certain amount of blind faith. I decided our first evening would be simple. Pasta, tomatoes, nothing ambitious. The tomatoes from the little supermarket in Stintino village were absurd. Properly red, properly misshapen, smelling of actual tomato rather than refrigerated truck. I chopped them roughly with garlic that was almost violently pungent, simmered them down with olive oil that came in a tin and tasted like liquid sunshine, and tossed it all through spaghetti that cost about sixty pence. We ate on the terrace with wine from the Coop, a Vermentino that was cold and sharp and perfect. I felt genuinely pleased with myself, which in retrospect was the first warning sign.

The next morning I attempted bread. There was a bakery in the village, but I had decided we would be the sort of travellers who bought proper ingredients and made things properly. I found yeast at a small alimentari, though the woman behind the counter looked at me with what I now recognise as well-founded scepticism. The dough rose in the warm kitchen while we walked to La Pelosa beach, that extraordinary stretch of pale sand and shallow turquoise water that makes you understand why people bother with Sardinia at all. We swam, got lightly sunburned in the way that British people always do despite knowing better, and returned to find my dough had risen magnificently and then collapsed into something with the texture and general demeanour of a rubber bath mat.

We ate it anyway, torn into chunks and dipped in more of that olive oil, alongside pecorino cheese that was sharp and crumbly and nothing like the supermarket version at home. The failure somehow made it better. There is something about eating your own disasters in foreign places that feels properly lived-in.

The market in Stintino happens twice weekly, and I approached it with the focused intensity of someone who has watched too many food documentaries. The fish stall was the main event, with whole sea bream and red mullet laid out on crushed ice, eyes still bright and accusatory. I bought squid, because it seemed adventurous, and spent twenty minutes that evening watching YouTube videos about how to clean it properly while my partner made increasingly pointed comments about hunger. The resulting dish was chewy in a way that suggested I had either cooked it for thirty seconds too long or three minutes too short, and I still do not know which. We finished it with lemon and a certain stubborn pride.

By our fourth day I had settled into a rhythm. Mornings meant coffee from the moka pot, strong enough to stand a spoon in, with pastries from that bakery I had initially shunned. The cornetti were filled with apricot jam that tasted of actual apricots, which sounds obvious until you have eaten the British equivalent. Lunches were assembled from market leftovers: ripe figs, wafer-thin slices of Sardinian ham, bread that I now bought sensibly from the bakery, accepting my limitations. Dinners became a proper production, the kitchen warm with garlic and anchovies, the little terrace table scattered with olive pits and wine corks.

I attempted fregola one evening, that toasted Sardinian pasta that looks like oversized couscous. I found it at a deli near the harbour, along with clams that were still alive and faintly indignant about the situation. The recipe seemed straightforward. It was not. The fregola stuck to the pan in a way that suggested I had fundamentally misunderstood something, and the clams opened at different rates, leaving some overcooked and others still slightly resistant. We ate it watching the sun go down, picking shell fragments from our teeth, agreeing that it was probably the best meal we had ever had. This is the thing about cooking on holiday. The standards shift. The context elevates.

On our final morning I made one last trip to the market, buying bottarga to take home, that pressed and dried mullet roe that tastes like the essence of the Mediterranean. Also more olive oil, several jars of honey, and a wheel of pecorino that I worried might not make it through airport security. It did, though the honey was confiscated at Gatwick, which felt like a fitting end to a trip defined by edible ambitions and partial successes.

We left the villa cleaner than we found it, which is not saying much, and drove back to Alghero with the windows down, smelling still of garlic and sea salt. I had not mastered Sardinian cooking. I had barely approached competence. But I had spent a week properly engaged with what I was eating, buying it from people who caught it or grew it or made it, failing at it and eating the failures anyway. That seems worth more than any number of perfect restaurant meals, though I would not say no to one of those next time. The sat nav would still be essential though. Some things do not change.