I should have known the holiday proper had begun when I tried to open the boot of our hire car and stood there for a full minute wondering why the key fob had apparently stopped working, only to realise I was at someone else's identical grey Volvo in the car park of the Coop Extra in Steinkjer. The actual car was three spaces down, looking deeply unimpressed. My partner found this hilarious, naturally, and I spent the remaining twenty minutes to Mosvik with a beetroot face and a renewed commitment to checking number plates.

The road from Steinkjer narrows and winds through proper Norwegian countryside, all birch forests and sudden glimpses of the fjord below. We arrived at the house in Mosvik in that particular golden evening light that makes everything look like a promotional photograph, though I was mainly focused on whether the Coop bags in the back contained everything we needed for dinner. They did not, as I would discover, but more on that shortly.

The house sat quietly on its plot with that modest Scandinavian confidence, nothing flashy but everything in its proper place. We fumbled with the key box, dropped it once onto the gravel with a clatter that probably disturbed half of Inderoy, and finally stepped inside to that particular smell of a well-kept holiday let: wood, faint cleaning products, and the ghost of a hundred previous dinners. The kitchen immediately declared itself the heart of the place, which suited me perfectly given my self-appointed role as holiday chef.

I had grand plans for our first evening. Proper Norwegian salmon, I thought, cooked simply with dill and new potatoes. The Coop had provided excellent potatoes and rather less excellent salmon that turned out, on closer inspection in the actual kitchen, to be trout. Fine, I thought, trout is also noble. I set about preparing my feast with the confidence of a man who had watched several cooking programmes and retained approximately none of the technique.

The hob, naturally, was induction, and I had never used one. There followed ten minutes of increasingly frantic button-pressing while my partner read the manual in Norwegian with the helpful addition of Google Translate, which kept suggesting the word "induction" meant "introduction" or occasionally "seduction." We got there eventually, by which point my carefully prepared trout had been sitting in its herbs long enough to look slightly offended.

The resulting meal was, I must be honest, a bit uneven. The potatoes were genuinely excellent, buttery and properly seasoned. The trout was cooked through, which I counted as victory enough, though the skin had achieved a texture I can only describe as "challenging." We ate on the small terrace with a view down towards the water, accompanied by a bottle of wine we had wisely purchased at duty free, and I decided that imperfect food in a perfect setting is rather the point of self-catering holidays.

Morning brought proper exploration of the local food possibilities. The village shop in Mosvik proved a treasure of useful basics and unexpected delights, including a brown cheese that I became genuinely obsessed with over the following days. The woman behind the counter tolerated my attempts at Norwegian with good grace and eventually just spoke English, which saved us both considerable effort.

I made several return trips to that shop, each time emerging with something I had not intended to buy. Cloudberries in syrup. A particularly assertive mustard. Some dried fish that I never quite found the courage to prepare properly and which eventually travelled home with us as a sort of culinary souvenir. The shopkeeper and I developed a rapport based on mutual amusement at my shopping habits.

The kitchen at the house gradually became my domain, for better and worse. I attempted proper fish cakes one evening, using a recipe I found in a battered cookbook left on the shelf. They held together adequately, which I considered triumph enough, and we ate them with a cucumber salad that my partner assembled with rather more skill than my own efforts. The local sour cream, thick and properly tangy, improved almost everything it touched.

Breakfast became a particular ritual. Those brown cheese sandwiches on dense, seeded bread from the shop, with good coffee and the view from the kitchen window. I am not a morning person by nature, but something about that particular combination made 7am almost tolerable. Almost.

By our final day I had accumulated a small arsenal of local ingredients with no clear plan for their use. We made a final large breakfast, slightly desperate in its generosity, trying to use everything at once. The resulting plate was a sort of Nordic greatest hits, slightly incoherent but made with genuine affection. We ate it in silence, mostly, watching the weather change over the water.

I left the remaining dried fish on the shelf for the next guests, a small mystery for them to contemplate. Some holiday traditions, I think, are best passed along.