I have never been so grateful to see a wooden cabin in my life as I was when we finally pulled up to our Sjusjoen hire in Hedmark after what can only be described as a comedy of errors. The journey from Oslo had started well enough, with me smugly declaring I had packed "everything we could possibly need" for a week of self-catering in the Norwegian countryside. This confidence lasted precisely until we were halfway up the E6 and I realised the "everything" did not, in fact, include the actual bag of food shopping I had so carefully selected at the Meny supermarket that morning. It was sitting in our hotel fridge in Oslo, probably having a lovely time without us. My partner found this hilarious. I did not, though I can laugh about it now. Mostly.

We arrived at the cabin hungry, slightly bickering, and in desperate need of provisions. The Sjusjoen area sits in proper forest country, all pine trees and clean air and that particular silence that makes you realise how much noise cities make. Our cabin was exactly what the pictures had promised, which is rare enough to mention: red wooden walls, a proper wood-burning stove, and a kitchen that looked like someone had actually cooked in it rather than just arranged olive oil bottles for Instagram. I immediately opened every cupboard to assess the damage of my packing failure. A few sad teabags, some salt, and a tin of something unlabelled left by a previous guest. Not exactly a feast.

The nearest proper shop was a Kiwi supermarket in nearby Lillehammer, about twenty minutes down the road. We made the trek in what I can only describe as a hunger-induced trance, filling our basket with the determined focus of people who had eaten nothing but service station crisps for six hours. I became briefly obsessed with a vacuum-packed lump of fenalar, the dried and salted lamb that is apparently a Hedmark speciality. My partner looked sceptical. "It looks like something a Viking would use as a weapon," he said. I bought it anyway. I also grabbed brunost, because you cannot come to Norway and not eat brown cheese, plus enough potatoes to suggest we were planning to survive a siege.

Back at the cabin, I attempted my first proper Norwegian-inspired meal with the enthusiasm of someone who had watched approximately zero cooking programmes about Scandinavian cuisine. The fenalar needed slicing thinly, which I managed with more determination than skill, creating pieces that ranged from elegant to "aggressively hacked." We fried potatoes in butter with plenty of salt and pepper, made a simple salad with cucumber and tomato, and laid out the brown cheese with some flatbrod crackers I had wisely purchased. The wood stove crackled. Outside, the pine trees did their silent Norwegian thing. And somehow, this basic plate of food tasted better than anything I had eaten in months.

The next morning brought what I can only call my brunost breakfast experiment. I had read that Norwegians eat this stuff on everything, so naturally I decided to test this theory across multiple food groups. Toast with brunost: excellent. Waffle with brunost: surprisingly good, if structurally unsound. Attempting to melt brunost into my coffee: a mistake I will not repeat and do not wish to discuss further. My partner photographed this last attempt for what he calls "evidence" and I call "blackmail material."

We discovered a small local bakery in Lillehammer that became our morning ritual, selling proper rugbrod and pastries that made my previous attempts at breakfast look frankly pathetic. I bought a loaf of the dark rye bread and spent the rest of the week trying to recreate their simple open sandwiches, layering on smoked salmon, pickled herring from a jar that terrified me slightly, and endless variations of dill and cucumber. My creations never quite matched the bakery's, but eaten on the cabin's wooden deck with a cup of strong coffee, they felt like the height of culinary achievement.

The cabin's kitchen, I should say, was perfectly equipped for my amateur efforts, with good knives and pans that actually conducted heat evenly, which is more than can be said for my flat in London. I cooked elk sausages one evening, bought from a local butcher who spoke approximately five words of English and communicated mostly through enthusiastic pointing. They were rich and gamey and completely unlike any sausage I had eaten before, served with lingonberry jam and more of those butter-fried potatoes that became our default carbohydrate.

By the end of the week, my initial panic about the forgotten shopping bag had transformed into something else entirely. I had planned to cook elaborate meals, to be organised and prepared and in control. Instead, I had stumbled through a week of improvised eating, of buying what looked interesting and figuring it out later, of making peace with slices of fenalar that would never win any beauty contests. The cabin's kitchen had seen my failures and my small successes, the brunost disaster and the elk sausage triumph. And sitting there on our final evening, eating yet another simple plate of good bread and cheese and cured meat while the stove burned low, I realised that this was exactly the kind of holiday eating I actually wanted. Not perfect, not planned, just present and hungry and willing to try. We packed the remaining brown cheese to take home. Some experiments, it turns out, are worth repeating.