I have never been quite so happy to see a sat nav give up on me as I was on the drive to Montelupo Fiorentino. We had been winding through the Tuscan hills for the best part of an hour, my partner navigating with the confidence of someone who had once spent a long weekend in Siena five years ago, when the voice calmly announced we had arrived. We were in a field. A very beautiful field, admittedly, with cypress trees and golden afternoon light, but definitely not the farmhouse with the pool I had been picturing for months. Three-point turn, mild bickering, and a helpful wave from an elderly man on a scooter later, we finally found the place. The key was in a lockbox, the code worked first time, and I immediately forgave everything because the kitchen, oh the kitchen, was enormous.

I am not a natural cook. This is something I have come to accept about myself with the same resigned wisdom one applies to being bad at parallel parking or remembering plant watering schedules. But there is something about a Tuscan farmhouse kitchen that makes you believe you might be. Perhaps it is the terracotta tiles, or the wooden beam that runs the length of the ceiling, or the fact that every utensil hangs in such pleasing order that you feel professionally equipped. Within an hour of arrival, I had planned an elaborate four-course dinner using only local ingredients. Within two hours, I had burned garlic to the point where the whole house smelled of disappointment and we had to open every window.

The following morning, properly chastened, we went to the weekly market in Montelupo itself. I had read that the town was famous for ceramics, which is all well and good, but I was there for the porchetta van. The man serving had the build and demeanour of someone who had spent thirty years perfecting one thing, and his sliced pork with crackling, stuffed into a crusty roll with nothing but salt and patience, reduced me to actual silence. My partner asked if I was alright. I was more than alright. I was having a religious experience near the cheese stall.

We bought vegetables that still had soil on them, pecorino aged to a crumbly sharpness, and a bottle of local Chianti that cost less than a London coffee. That evening I attempted ribollita, the Tuscan bread and bean soup that sounds simple and is not. The cabbage fought back. The stale bread dissolved into something between soup and porridge. But sitting on the terrace with that questionable bowl, watching the sun drop behind the hills, it tasted of effort and place and something I could not quite name. My partner said it was good. He is a kind man. It was probably not good.

By day three I had found my level. Breakfast became a ritual of fresh ricotta from the market, drizzled with honey we bought from a woman whose bees apparently lived in a specific olive grove and were very happy about it. Lunch was assembly rather than cooking: ripe tomatoes, milky mozzarella, basil torn rather than chopped because I had read somewhere that this released the oils differently. Dinner I largely surrendered to the local trattoria ten minutes walk away, where the owner remembered our names by the second visit and teased me about my ribollita attempt. His version was better. Obviously.

The kitchen at the farmhouse became less about ambition and more about pleasure. I learned to make proper cacio e pepe, though I cracked the peppercorns with a wine bottle and felt quite rustic doing so. I learned that Tuscan bread, made without salt, makes more sense when you have proper salty cheese and cured meat to balance it. I learned that my best meals were not the planned ones but the accidental ones, the leftover porchetta thrown into scrambled eggs, the market peaches eaten over the sink with juice running down my wrist.

On our final morning, I stood in that kitchen with my coffee and looked at the marks I had made, the slight scorch on the wooden spoon, the wine stain on the counter that would not quite scrub out. I thought about all the elaborate meals I had imagined cooking, the person I had thought I might become in this place. I had become someone slightly different instead, someone who could assemble a decent lunch and accept help from a porchetta man and find joy in not being very good at something but doing it anyway. The sat nav had been wrong about the field, but it had eventually brought us here. I was glad to be lost, and found, and fed.