I should have known the Norwegian countryside would humble me the moment I confidently loaded our shopping into the boot at the airport and watched a wheel of brown cheese roll out and escape across the car park. My partner just stood there, arms crossed, as I chased it past two very amused locals. "Brunost waits for no one," one of them called out. Welcome to Oppland.

The drive from Oslo to our cabin near Skabu took about four hours, winding through valleys that grew increasingly dramatic and increasingly empty of anything resembling a Tesco Metro. By the time we spotted the red wooden house perched above a meadow, I was already mentally inventorying our supplies and wondering if "rustic self-catering" had been a terrible mistake.

The cabin itself was immediately charming in that very Norwegian way - clean lines, everything practical, a kitchen that looked like it had actually been used for cooking rather than Instagram staging. But the nearest shop of any substance was back in Vinstra, twenty minutes down the road, and we had arrived on a Saturday afternoon when everything rural in Norway shuts tighter than a drum until Monday morning.

Our first evening became a masterclass in creative pantry management. I had packed what I thought were sensible self-catering staples: pasta, tinned tomatoes, some questionable chorizo from the reduced section at Gatwick. My partner had more sensibly grabbed bread, butter, and two blocks of that fleeing brown cheese. We made a sort of deconstructed pizza on the cabin's ancient but fierce stovetop, ate it looking out at mountains that made our culinary inadequacy feel almost poetic, and agreed that food tastes better when you've had to work for it.

Sunday morning brought proper panic and a desperate drive to Vinstra's one open petrol station, where we bought overpriced milk, some vacuum-packed salmon that looked like it had been there since the Olympics, and a jar of something called "syltetoy" that turned out to be jam. Breakfast back at the cabin was therefore eclectic: brown cheese on crispbread, salmon that we convinced ourselves was meant to be eaten raw, and coffee strong enough to strip paint. The view from the kitchen window - mist rising off the meadow, a horse that appeared to be judging our life choices - almost made up for the culinary chaos.

Monday finally delivered salvation in the form of Vinstra's small but proper supermarket. I have rarely been so emotionally moved by the sight of fresh vegetables. We loaded up with local potatoes, reindeer stew meat, cloudberries in syrup, and enough brunost to survive a siege. That evening I attempted my first proper Norwegian meal, following a handwritten recipe card left in the cabin drawer. The reindeer stew was edible, which I consider a triumph given my usual standard with unfamiliar meat. My partner made flatbread from a packet mix that required only water and optimism. We ate in silence for several minutes, which in our house means genuine approval.

The rest of the week settled into a rhythm I hadn't expected to love so much. Mornings meant slow breakfasts with proper coffee and brown cheese sliced so thin you could read through it - a technique I perfected through sheer stubbornness after my early doorstop attempts. Lunches were simple affairs: leftovers, crispbread, whatever we had. But dinners became our project. I tried fiskeboller one night, those mild fish balls in white sauce, and while mine looked nothing like the photo on the tin, they were comfortingly bland in the way that only Scandinavian comfort food can be.

We found a small farm shop a few miles toward Nord-Fron that sold goat cheese so fresh it still tasted of meadow, and eggs with orange yolks that made our morning scramble look professionally staged. The woman running it spoke barely any English and my Norwegian extends only to "takk" and "ol," but we communicated through the universal language of pointing at cheese and nodding enthusiastically.

My most ambitious moment came midweek when I attempted to make multekrem, that cloudberry and cream dessert I'd read about. The cloudberries from the farm shop were precious as jewels. I whipped the cream too long and it went grainy. I served it anyway, in mismatched bowls, and we ate it watching the light stay stubbornly in the sky past ten o'clock. "It's meant to be like this," my partner lied kindly. "Rustic."

By our final evening, I had finally relaxed into the cabin kitchen's quirks - the hot spot on the stovetop, the knife that only worked if you held it a certain way, the satisfying clunk of the old fridge door. I made a simple meal of local trout, bought from a man with a smoker in his garden that we'd passed three times before working up the courage to knock. We ate with our feet up on the deck, the last of the brown cheese finally finished, the last of the cloudberry jam scraped from its jar.

I came to Norway thinking self-catering meant freedom from restaurant bills. I left understanding it as something slower and more stubborn - the patience to work with what a place actually offers you, the humility to serve grainy cream and call it dessert, the particular joy of a meal made difficult by closed shops and rescued by petrol station salmon. We stopped at that same petrol station on the way back to the airport, me slightly desperate for one last fix of whatever syltetoy actually was. The woman behind the counter recognised us, or perhaps just recognised the panic in our eyes. "Monday morning," she said, ringing up our purchases. "Always the same with you tourists."

She wasn't wrong. And I wasn't even slightly offended.