I have never been so excited about a wheel of Edam cheese in my entire life, and that includes the time I accidentally wore two left wellies to a festival. The journey to Heinkenszand had been one of those classic British-in-a-car situations: three hours of motorway zen, a brief argument with a sat nav that insisted "Zeeland" was somewhere near Denmark, and then the Channel Tunnel's lesser-known cousin, the boat from Breskens to Vlissingen, which I nearly missed because I was too busy eating a soggy service station sandwich.

The mishap came immediately upon arrival. I had spent weeks smugly telling friends I was "self-catering in Zeeland" with the kind of tone people reserve for discovering obscure wine. I pulled up to the holiday home, a proper tidy little place with a garden that smelled of cut grass and neighbourly competence, and proudly produced my carefully compiled shopping list. Then I opened the boot. No bags. None. I had left the entire lot, including my specially sourced Cornish sea salt and a jar of Marmite I considered essential for morale, on the kitchen counter in Kent. I stood there in the driveway, key in hand, contemplating whether I could live off the single mint I found in my coat pocket.

The nearest supermarket was in Goes, about fifteen minutes away, which in Dutch terms apparently means "just pop round the corner." I drove there in what I can only describe as a state of culinary panic. The Albert Heijn was enormous, brightly lit, and full of Dutch people who clearly knew what they were doing with their evening. I wandered the aisles in a daze, confronted by forty varieties of stroopwafel and something called "hagelslag" that looked like chocolate sprinkles for bread. I bought these, obviously. I also bought a lump of aged Gouda the size of my fist, some proper Dutch butter in a tin, and bread from the in-store bakery that was still warm. The woman at the till seemed amused by my combination of tourist bewilderment and desperate hunger.

Back at the house, I made what I now call my "Forgotten Everything Feast": thick slices of that Gouda, butter so yellow it looked Photoshopped, bread torn rather than cut because I could not locate a bread knife, and hagelslag sprinkled experimentally on everything. I ate this in the garden as the light went soft, drinking a bottle of local Zeeland beer I had wisely grabbed at the till. The beer was from a brewery I later learned was just up the road in Tholen, crisp and slightly bitter, the sort of thing that makes you reconsider your usual loyalties to British bitter.

The next morning I discovered the Thursday market in Heinkenszand itself, which I had entirely missed in my research because I had been too busy planning elaborate meals I would never cook. It was not large, but it was serious. An old boy sold me mussels from Yerseke, which is basically the mussel capital of the universe if you care about such things, and explained at length, in Dutch that I mostly understood through hand gestures, how to steam them properly. I nodded along, bought two kilos, and immediately worried about whether the kitchen had a big enough pot.

It did not, quite. I made it work with creative lid positioning and a lot of nervous hovering. The mussels opened like obedient little mouths, and I ate them with frites from a stall in the market, proper thick-cut ones with mayonnaise that I had initially been snobbish about but now completely understand. The whole operation took place on the house's small patio, with a neighbour's cat watching in apparent judgement.

By day three I had settled into a rhythm of market mornings and increasingly ambitious evening cooking. I found a fishmonger in Goes who sold me fresh North Sea shrimp, tiny sweet things that I peeled with a beer and a sense of purpose I rarely achieve at home. I attempted a Zeeland-style fish stew using local potatoes and a splash of wine, which bubbled away while I sat in the garden with my book and another of those local beers. The stew was slightly too salty because I had forgotten that the fish came from salty water already, but I ate it with pride and a lot of bread.

The self-catering element became less about following recipes and more about assembling excellent things and eating them without ceremony. I bought Zeeland bolus, a sort of sticky cinnamon bun, for breakfast every other day from a bakery I found by following my nose. I cooked asparagus when it appeared at the market, white and fat and completely different from the thin green spears I was used to, simply boiled and draped in that same excellent butter.

On my final evening I made a proper meal of it. I returned to the market for more mussels, cooked them in the now-confident pot with shallots and the local beer, and ate them with more frites and mayonnaise on the patio as the light faded. I had bought a second wheel of that Edam, smaller this time, and ate slices of it afterwards with the last of the stroopwafels, which I had discovered go surprisingly well with cheese if you stop thinking about it too hard.

I left the Marmite behind for the next guests, a small act of international diplomacy. I drove home with butter in my luggage and a new understanding of what self-catering actually means when you stop trying so hard and just eat what is good where you are.