I have always believed that the true measure of a holiday is not the view from your bedroom window, though that helps, but what you end up putting on your plate. Our recent trip to a farmhouse just outside Massa Martana in Umbria put this theory to the test rather spectacularly, and not always in ways I expected.

The journey from the airport had been the usual Italian mix of breathtaking scenery and white-knuckle driving. My partner was navigating, I was at the wheel of our hire car, and somewhere between Todi and our destination I became convinced that the sat nav was leading us to an abandoned gravel pit rather than a holiday home. We bounced down what I can only describe as a farm track that grew narrower with every metre, hedgerows scratching both sides of the car like impatient cats. I was muttering something about turning back when we crested a small rise and there it was: a solid stone farmhouse with terracotta roof tiles, a proper rustic kitchen with an actual fireplace, and most importantly, a covered terrace where I could already picture myself eating lunch with a glass of something local.

The mishap came within ten minutes of arrival. I had spotted a wood-fired oven in the garden and, drunk on pastoral fantasy, decided we simply must cook our first dinner in it that very evening. I gathered wood, I built what I thought was a respectable fire, I waited for the embers to reach that perfect white heat I had read about in a cookbook somewhere. What I had not accounted for was my complete inability to judge temperature by eye. The pizza I slid in on a makeshift peel made from a baking tray turned to charcoal in approximately ninety seconds. The second attempt, made with more caution and less pride, emerged doughy and pale. By the third try I had wasted half a kilo of proper Italian flour, the kitchen was smoky, and my partner was making pointed comments about perhaps using the perfectly functional gas hob indoors. We ended up eating bread and cheese on the terrace at half past nine, me slightly soot-stained, both of us laughing rather harder than the situation strictly warranted. I have never been so thoroughly humbled by a piece of cooking equipment.

The next morning I walked into Massa Martana itself, a proper working village rather than a tourist confection, and found the small butcher's shop near the church. The man behind the counter spoke no English and my Italian extends barely past please and thank you, but we managed through pointing and enthusiastic nodding. I came away with thick slices of prosciutto, a length of proper Umbrian sausage flavoured with garlic and fennel, and something the butcher kept calling cinghiale which I later worked out was wild boar. The village also had a tiny alimentari where I bought pecorino aged until it was almost crumbly, a jar of local honey that tasted faintly of thyme, and bread that was properly chewy with a dark crust.

For the rest of the week I abandoned any pretence of wood-fired heroics and cooked simply on the stove. I made ragu with the sausage, letting it simmer for hours while we sat on the terrace with books and the occasional glass of Sagrantino. I fried thick slices of aubergine from a market in Todi, layering them with tomato and mozzarella in a dish that bore only a distant cousinship to anything authentically parmigiana but tasted wonderful anyway. One morning I drove to a slightly larger town and found a market where an old woman was selling bunches of wild asparagus she had gathered herself that dawn. I bought two bunches, cooked them with eggs into a frittata that we ate warm for lunch with the leftover bread, and felt genuinely pleased with myself in a way that no restaurant meal has ever quite matched.

The local supermarket, which I visited more than I care to admit, became a source of genuine pleasure. I am not normally someone who browses dried pasta aisles with enthusiasm, but there was something about being in Italy, buying shapes I had never heard of to serve with sauces I improvised from whatever looked good, that felt like proper holiday freedom. I bought enormous tins of tomatoes, better than anything I can get at home, and reduced them slowly with garlic and the excellent local olive oil I found in a plain bottle with a handwritten label.

By the end of the week I had developed a small routine. Morning coffee on the terrace, perhaps a pastry from the bar in the village if I could get there before they sold out. A light lunch assembled from whatever was in the fridge, eaten in the shade. Then the serious business of planning dinner, which involved at least one trip somewhere for an ingredient I had decided was essential, a glass of wine while cooking, and a slow meal as the light faded and the swallows began their evening circuits overhead.

I never did master that wood-fired oven. On our final evening I managed to produce a loaf of bread that was actually edible, though I suspect this was more luck than skill. We ate it with the last of the cheese and some figs from a tree near the house, and I felt a proper contentment that had very little to do with perfection and everything to do with the pleasure of feeding yourself slowly in a beautiful place. I came home with recipes scrawled on the back of supermarket receipts, a bottle of that olive oil wrapped carefully in a tea towel, and the certain knowledge that I will never look at a wood-fired oven without a small shiver of remembered humiliation.