I have never been so relieved to see a wooden hut in my life. After a three-hour drive from Bodo airport, a wrong turn that took me through what I am fairly certain was someone's sheep field, and one spectacular moment where my hire car's sat-nav tried to send me directly into a fjord, I finally spotted the Nykvag perched on its little hillside above the water. I also spotted, rather less welcome, that I had left my entire bag of groceries on the kitchen counter of the airport cafe. Every single item. The cheese, the bread, the emergency packet of custard creams I had packed in a fit of optimism about self-catering life. All of it, enjoying its own holiday sixty miles behind me.

The cottage itself, though, immediately made up for my idiocy. It is one of those proper Norwegian red wooden places, the sort that looks like it has been painted annually since approximately 1890 and will outlast civilisation itself. I fumbled with the key box, dropped the code sheet in a puddle, and finally stumbled through the door with nothing but a bottle of flat airport Coke and a profound sense of hunger.

The kitchen, I discovered, was unexpectedly glorious. Proper gas hob, decent knives, a view straight out across the water that made me stop mid-unpacking and just stare. I had planned this whole week of ambitious Nordic cooking. I was going to forage, to fish, to become the sort of person who casually prepares gravlax while discussing the weather. Instead I had no food, it was eight in the evening, and the nearest shop was, according to my damp code sheet, somewhere in the vague direction of "that way."

I drove, slightly desperate, to what turned out to be a petrol station fifteen minutes along the coast. This is where I must praise Norwegian petrol station cuisine, because I emerged with a hot dog of frankly unreasonable quality, some suspiciously good bread, and a tub of something labelled simply "fish soup" that I warmed up back at the cottage and ate straight from the pot while standing at the window watching the light fade across the mountains. It was, I am not ashamed to say, one of the best meals I have ever had. Something about the combination of exhaustion, mild hysteria, and genuinely excellent soup.

The next morning I found the proper shop in the nearby village, a small but determined Coop that had clearly seen many holidaymakers arrive with similarly empty cupboards. I bought eggs that tasted like actual eggs, proper brown cheese which I had convinced myself I would learn to love, and some local cod that the woman behind the counter wrapped in paper with the confidence of someone who has never once doubted her fish. I also bought three types of jam, a jar of pickled herring I immediately regretted, and what I thought was cream but turned out to be some kind of cultured milk product that sat in the fridge judging me for the rest of the week.

My first attempt at proper cooking was breakfast, and I am still thinking about it. Those eggs, fried slowly in butter with the brown cheese melted on top, eaten on the little wooden deck with a cup of coffee that never seemed to cool down because I kept getting distracted by the view. I have eaten in restaurants that charge forty pounds for a starter and not felt half as satisfied.

The local market, when I found it, was less a market and more a man called Erik selling fish from the back of his van near the harbour. I bought more cod, some enormous prawns still smelling of the sea, and a bag of potatoes from his brother's farm that were still covered in actual soil. Erik explained, in excellent English and with concerning hand gestures, exactly how to cook the prawns. I understood perhaps sixty percent of this advice and decided to wing the rest.

That evening I attempted a fish stew. It involved butter, those potatoes, some stock cubes I had panicked-bought, and a splash of white wine I was definitely not going to waste. The result was slightly too salty, somewhat unevenly cooked, and absolutely demolished in about twelve minutes while I sat on the sofa with my feet up, watching a fishing boat come in across the dark water. I have made technically better meals in my life. I have rarely made one that mattered more.

The brown cheese, incidentally, never grew on me. I tried it on toast, in sandwiches, once in a moment of madness grated onto pasta. It remained stubbornly itself, sweet and faintly caramel and completely wrong for everything I attempted. I finished the packet anyway, out of some strange respect for its persistence, and have since developed a complicated fondness for it that I cannot fully explain.

By midweek I had settled into a rhythm of simple, greedy meals. Mornings were eggs and coffee and whatever bread was left. Lunches were increasingly elaborate sandwiches assembled from whatever Erik or the Coop had provided, eaten during walks along the stony beach below the cottage. Dinners became my proper project, not because the cooking was sophisticated but because the ingredients needed so little interference. Fresh fish, good butter, those ridiculous potatoes. I once spent an hour making a sauce that I realised, too late, was completely unnecessary. The cod was better plain.

The kitchen at the Nykvag, I came to understand, was not a place for showing off. It was a place for paying attention. To the quality of what was available, to the light changing outside the window, to the particular pleasure of feeding yourself well in a place that feels very far from everything familiar. I burned one pan quite badly, undercooked some rice in a way that was almost artistic, and produced one fish soup that even I admitted was a mistake. But I also made meals I will remember for years, not because they were perfect but because they were entirely mine, created from whatever I could find and whatever I could manage, in a little red house above a Norwegian fjord.

On my final morning I fried the last of the eggs, finished the last of the bread, and sat on that deck for a long time with my coffee going cold. I thought about the groceries I had left behind in Bodo, the plans I had made, the cook I had imagined becoming. I was not that person, not really. But I was someone who had learned to make a decent fish stew in a foreign kitchen, who had eaten well and simply, who had finally understood that brown cheese is not about liking it so much as respecting its right to exist. That felt like enough. That felt, actually, like rather a lot.