I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I tried to open the wrong cabin door in front of three very confused Norwegians. We'd driven up from Oslo through some of the most absurdly beautiful scenery I'd ever seen, mountains like something from a postcard, and by the time we reached the Valdres region in Oppland I was properly starved. The satnav had been cheerfully optimistic about our arrival time, neglecting to mention the winding roads that made my partner slightly green around the gills. We finally pulled up at what I was certain was our cabin, I marched straight up with the key code, and nothing. Turned out our actual place was fifty metres further down, identical in every way except for the small matter of it being the one we'd actually paid for.

Once inside, the first thing I did was investigate the kitchen. This is perhaps revealing about my priorities, but a week in Norway with self-catering ambitions requires proper reconnaissance. The cabin kitchen was surprisingly well-equipped, which immediately filled me with misplaced confidence. I unpacked our first haul from the Fagernes supermarket we'd stopped at, a rather chaotic experience involving me pointing at various cheeses and hoping for the best. I'd grabbed something labelled "brunost" on the recommendation of a helpful local, plus various cured meats, some very expensive tomatoes, and a loaf of bread that felt substantial enough to use as a doorstop.

That first evening I attempted what I grandly called a "Nordic platter," which mostly involved arranging things on a wooden board and pretending I'd planned it. The brunost was my undoing. For the uninitiated, this is brown cheese, and it tastes like someone has managed to solidify caramel and make it slightly savoury. I served it with crackers and watched my partner's face cycle through several emotions. We ate it, of course. We'd paid for it. But I quietly moved the remaining block to the back of the fridge, where it remained for several days like a silent accusation.

Breakfast the next morning was more successful, largely because it involved eggs and nothing I could ruin through cultural ambition. The cabin had a proper coffee machine, and I spent an embarrassing amount of time figuring out the Norwegian instructions before producing something drinkable. We ate on the small terrace, watching mist lift off the nearby lake, feeling terribly pleased with ourselves. The bread, it turned out, was perfect when toasted and loaded with butter that tasted somehow cleaner than British butter. I don't know how else to describe it.

By day three I'd become slightly obsessed with the local food shops. There's something about holiday cooking that removes all the domestic drudgery and makes even chopping an onion feel like an adventure. We found a small farm shop not far from the cabin, selling vegetables that actually tasted of something, and lamb sausages that I grilled badly on the cabin's barbecue. The outside temperature was perhaps not ideal for outdoor cooking, but I stood there in my coat, turning things with increasing desperation while my partner made encouraging noises from the doorway. The sausages were charred in places and suspiciously pink in others. We ate them with a jar of pickled something-or-other and felt very brave.

The cabin's kitchen became my domain that week, for better and frequently for worse. I attempted a fish soup using local trout, following a recipe I'd found on my phone with patchy signal. It was thin and slightly grey and my partner described it as "interesting" with the particular intonation that means the opposite. We finished it over two evenings, because waste feels more sinful when you're surrounded by such natural abundance. I had better luck with a simple stew of root vegetables and beef, left to bubble for hours while we walked through the nearby countryside, returning to proper cooking smells and the satisfying feeling of having vaguely planned ahead.

What I loved most, I think, was the ritual of it. Mornings began with proper coffee and that heavy bread, evenings with me faffing about with pans while the light did extraordinary things across the lake. We ate late, as the Norwegians seem to, and talked more than we do at home, perhaps because there was nowhere else to be. The brunost eventually got another chance, melted into a sauce for venison meatballs I found at the supermarket, and I understood it properly for the first time. Some things simply require context.

On our final evening I made pancakes with local berries we'd picked, slightly underripe but beautiful in their stubbornness. They were not good pancakes, too thick and oddly chewy, but we ate them with the last of our coffee and watched the sun refuse to properly set. I thought about all the meals that week, the successes and the quiet disasters, and how they would blur together in memory until only the good parts remained. That's the trick of holidays, isn't it? Even the burnt sausages become funny eventually.