I have never been so happy to see a wheelie bin in my life. Three hours of driving from the Eurotunnel, a sat-nav that insisted Dirkshorn was "in the sea," and one spectacular argument with a roundabout near Alkmaar later, we finally crunched up the gravel drive of our holiday cottage. My partner went to open the boot. I went to open the front door. Neither of us had the keys. They were, naturally, still sitting in the ignition, along with my dignity and our entire supply of stroopwafels.

The cottage itself was proper Dutch charm - all gabled roof, whitewashed walls, and a kitchen that looked like someone had lovingly assembled it from a 1970s IKEA catalogue and a farmer's boot sale. But what sold me, instantly, was the garden. Not the view, not the tidy lawn, but the barbecue. A proper kettle barbecue, slightly rusted, clearly veteran of a hundred summer evenings. I decided then and there that we would cook everything on it. Everything.

The first morning, we found the local market in Schagen, about ten minutes away. I have never seen so many cheeses in one place, and I say this as someone who once got lost in the Waitrose dairy aisle for twenty minutes. The Dutch do not mess about with their kaas. We bought a wedge of young Gouda that squeaked when you bit it, some aged stuff that smelled like a farmyard in July, and something the vendor described as "very special" that turned out to be cumin cheese. My partner made a face like she'd eaten a lemon. I loved it. This pretty much set the tone for the week.

Back at the cottage, I attempted my first proper Dutch meal. Stamppot, I thought. How hard can mashed potatoes with vegetables be? The answer, I discovered, is very hard indeed when you have overestimated your potato-to-kale ratio by approximately 400 percent. What emerged from my pot was less a hearty winter dish and more a green sludge that would not look out of place in a science experiment. We ate it anyway, sat at the wooden kitchen table with the windows open to the garden, and laughed until my sides hurt. Sometimes the disasters are the point.

The second day brought better fortune and actual research. We cycled to a farm shop just outside the village - Dirkshorn is small enough that "just outside" means about five minutes of pedalling past neat fields and the occasional very judgmental sheep. This shop had eggs still warm from the chicken, tomatoes that actually tasted of something, and smoked sausage that made me want to write poetry. I bought far too much of everything, which is my perpetual holiday sin.

That evening, the barbecue finally saw action. I grilled those tomatoes until they blistered and burst, threw on some of the sausage, and made a sort of makeshift stamppot with proper proportions and significantly less hysteria. We ate outside as the light faded, wrapped in jumpers because Northern Holland evenings have a chill that sneaks up on you, passing the cheese back and forth and arguing about whether the cumin one was actually nice or just interesting.

By midweek, I had developed a minor obsession with Dutch pancakes. The cottage had a proper cast-iron pan, the kind that weighs as much as a small dog, and I became determined to master pannenkoeken. My first attempt stuck to the pan so thoroughly I considered just throwing the whole thing away and buying a new one. My third attempt was edible. My fifth was genuinely good, thin and lacy at the edges, and I ate it with powdered sugar and a smugness that was entirely unwarranted given the preceding carnage.

We found a brilliant fishmonger in nearby Warmenhuizen, where I bought herring because I felt I should, then spent an hour googling whether you eat it raw or pickle it or what. The answer, apparently, is that you hold it by the tail and lower it into your mouth like a baby bird being fed by its mother. I could not bring myself to do this. We pan-fried it instead, with butter and lemon, and it was delicious, and I will take this secret to my grave.

The local Albert Heijn supermarket became our second home. I became weirdly invested in their biscuit selection, their surprisingly good own-brand gin, and their ready-made rookworst that I told myself was for emergencies but actually ate for lunch three days running. My partner developed a fondness for hagelslag, those chocolate sprinkles the Dutch put on bread for breakfast, which she ate straight from the packet while standing in the kitchen in her pyjamas, looking faintly guilty.

Our final evening, I attempted something approaching a feast. Barbecued pork from that brilliant farm shop, potatoes boiled then finished on the grill, a salad of market tomatoes and cucumber with nothing but good oil and salt, and that cumin cheese sliced thin as punishment for my earlier arrogance. We opened a bottle of wine we'd bought in Schagen, sat in the garden as the bats came out, and talked about nothing much for hours.

I burned the pork slightly. The potatoes were unevenly cooked. The salad was perfect, which felt like a fluke. We ate every bit of it, sitting there in the cooling dark, and I felt something shift in me. I am not a natural cook. I am impatient, I do not follow instructions well, and I have a tendency to believe I can improvise my way out of any culinary corner. Usually this ends in takeaway. Here, in this odd little cottage in a village I had never heard of, with ingredients I barely understood, something different happened. The failures were funny. The successes felt earned. The whole thing mattered in a way that restaurant meals, however excellent, rarely do.

We left the next morning with a boot full of cheese, a suitcase of stroopwafels, and a promise to return that we both knew we might not keep. The sat-nav tried to send us into the sea again. I did not even get angry. Some things, I had learned, are worth getting lost for.