The drive from Oslo Airport was meant to take an hour and a quarter, which in my head translated to "roughly an hour, give or take a podcast episode." I had downloaded three episodes of a comedy panel show, convinced I would only need one. By the time I reached the turning for Storsand in Hurum, I had burned through all three and was frantically searching for phone signal to load a fourth, entirely missing the first signpost and ending up down a farm track surrounded by very judgmental-looking sheep. The sheep, I should note, were the first locals I encountered, and they were not impressed by my waving apology as I reversed past them.

The property itself sits tucked along the Drammensfjord, and my first impression upon finally arriving was the smell of pine and salt water hitting me like a friendly slap. I stood there with my supermarket bags from the Meny in Drammen, which I had optimistically filled with what I considered "authentic Norwegian cooking ingredients." This included three types of brown cheese, a fish I could not identify despite staring at the label for several minutes, and some reindeer sausage that I had purchased mainly because it felt like the right thing to do. The kitchen, I quickly discovered, was genuinely lovely: proper gas hob, decent knives, and a window overlooking the water that made even my terrible cooking look picturesque.

That first evening I attempted what I grandly called "a simple Norwegian-inspired supper." The brown cheese, I learned very quickly, is not a melting cheese. Not in any meaningful sense. It sits in the pan looking at you with a sort of stoic resistance, then turns into something resembling warm caramel that refuses to bond with anything else on your plate. I had planned to serve it with the mystery fish, which turned out to be lutefisk after I finally translated the packaging, and which I had absolutely no business attempting as a first-night meal. The reindeer sausage saved me. I fried it with some onions I found in the back of the car from a previous trip, made a mountain of mashed potatoes, and ate it standing at the kitchen counter while watching a heron stand completely still in the shallows. The sausage was excellent. The brown cheese incident went straight into the food waste, and I chose not to speak of it again.

Morning brought the proper discovery of local food possibilities. The Hurumlandet area has these brilliant little farm shops and honesty boxes along the roads, and I became slightly obsessed with them. I found one selling fresh eggs with a handwritten note saying "honk twice for chickens," which I did, though no chickens appeared and I felt foolish for several minutes afterward. Another had new potatoes in a wheelbarrow with a jam jar for payment. I bought two kilograms because the wheelbarrow was charming and I have no impulse control on holiday. These potatoes became the foundation of every meal for three days. Boiled with dill I found growing wild near the shore. Fried with the eggs from the honking incident. Cold in a salad with some very expensive tomatoes from the Spar in Saelvik, which became my backup shopping destination after I accepted that farm shops, delightful as they are, do not reliably stock toilet paper.

The local baker in Holmsbu, which sits about twenty minutes along the coast, became my weekend pilgrimage. I drove there on the Saturday morning with noble intentions of buying "a couple of rolls," then emerged twenty minutes later with a cardboard box containing cinnamon buns, cardamom twists, something called skolebrod that I ate in the car park like an animal, and a sourdough loaf the size of a steering wheel. The woman behind the counter spoke perfect English but humoured my attempts at Norwegian with the patience of someone who has watched many tourists point and hope. I told her I was staying in Storsand. She nodded and asked if I had tried the local prawns yet. I had not. She looked at me with something between concern and challenge.

That evening I found the prawns at a harbour-side seller near Holmsbu, cooked and chilled and smelling of the sea in a way that made my supermarket fish embarrassment feel very distant indeed. I ate them on the property's terrace with my fingers, with buttered bread and mayonnaise and a white wine that cost more than I normally spend but felt necessary for the occasion. The sun stayed up late, as it does, and I sat there with prawn shell fragments accumulating on a plate and felt genuinely pleased with myself for the first time since the brown cheese catastrophe.

Self-catering, I reflected, is really just a series of small humiliations punctuated by occasional triumphs, and the triumphs taste better for the effort. I never did master the brown cheese. But I did learn to make a respectable fish soup with local cod, to identify at least three edible things growing near the shoreline, and to always carry small change for honesty boxes. The heron, I noticed on my final morning, was still standing in the same spot, presumably waiting for something better to come along. I knew exactly how it felt, and I left it a few prawn shells by way of apology for my earlier cooking attempts.