I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I put the sat nav postcode in wrong and ended up at a petrol station just outside Assen, arguing with a machine that only spoke Dutch and refused my card three times. Turns out I was fifteen miles north of where I actually needed to be. My partner just sat there eating crisps, offering absolutely no help whatsoever, which I suppose counts as moral support in some cultures.

When we finally found the place in Erm, I was already starving and slightly delirious. The cottage sat among trees with that particular stillness you only get in Drenthe, where the landscape is so flat you start to understand why Dutch painters went mad for skies. The owner had left us a loaf of bread, some butter, and a note saying the nearest supermarket was in Emmen. We tore into that bread like wolves. I have never tasted plain white bread so profoundly. It was religious.

The kitchen at the cottage was compact but serious, the kind where everything has a specific drawer and you feel judged for putting the wooden spoon in the wrong one. We had grand plans about cooking proper meals, buying local ingredients, becoming the sort of people who casually make stamppot on a Tuesday. The reality was more chaotic. Our first attempt at shopping in Emmen involved me buying what I thought was bacon but turned out to be something called katenspek, which is basically cooked ham pretending to be bacon and breaking your heart. I fried it anyway. We ate it in silence, chewing through our disappointment.

The next morning I found the local market in Emmen, which runs on certain days and rewards the organised. I am not organised. I arrived at half past eleven when the serious shoppers had already bagged the good cheese and the last of the proper rookworst. Still, I managed to get some excellent aged Edam, a bunch of carrots with actual soil still on them, and some eggs from a woman who kept chickens "just behind the house, very happy chickens, you can tell." I believed her completely. I have no way of verifying chicken happiness but her conviction was persuasive.

Back at the cottage I attempted boerenkool stamppot because I had read about it in a guidebook and it seemed appropriately rustic. The kale was fine. The potatoes were fine. The rookworst I had panic-bought from a supermarket because the market had sold out was not fine. It had the texture of something that had given up on life several weeks prior. My partner, who had been so supportive during the sat nav disaster, finally spoke. "Maybe we should just go to that cafe in Erm tomorrow," she said, gently. I agreed with the grace of a defeated general.

That cafe, as it happened, was brilliant. Simple sandwiches, good coffee, a proprietress who remembered us from the market and did not mention the stamppot incident, which she almost certainly knew about because Drenthe is not as large as it looks on maps. We went back three times. I became briefly obsessed with their appeltaart, which was nothing like British apple pie and everything like what British apple pie dreams of becoming when it grows up.

By the end of the week I had settled into a rhythm. Mornings at the cottage with proper Dutch bread from the bakery in Emmen, afternoons exploring, evenings attempting increasingly ambitious cooking with decreasing amounts of disaster. I made a respectable erwtensoep on the final night, thick enough to stand a spoon in, which I understand is the traditional test. My partner photographed it. This is the modern equivalent of a round of applause.

What I learned, I suppose, is that self-catering in someone else's country is partly about food and partly about humility. You will buy the wrong things. You will misunderstand labels. You will serve a meal that would make a Dutch grandmother weep, though hopefully not with joy. But then you will also find a cafe that becomes yours for a week, and a bakery that makes bread worth getting lost for, and you will understand why people come back to places like Erenthe, which is not famous and does not want to be, which simply feeds you and lets you get on with it.

We left the remaining katenspek in the fridge for the next guests. Consider it a warning, or perhaps a challenge.