The drive from Stavanger Airport to Vikesa was going brilliantly until I realised, somewhere near Sandnes, that I'd left the entire bag of groceries on the trolley at the terminal. There I was, proudly navigating Norwegian roundabouts for the first time, mentally rehearsing my triumphant arrival with locally sourced lamb and brown cheese, while the actual lamb was probably being adopted by airport security. My partner found this hilarious for approximately four minutes, then remembered we had no milk for morning coffee.

We pulled up to the Vikesa Veen just as the late afternoon light was doing that magical Norwegian thing where everything looks slightly golden and worthy of a postcard. The property sits in proper countryside, surrounded by the kind of quiet that makes you immediately lower your voice without knowing why. I fumbled with the key box while my stomach growled audibly, already mourning the reindeer stew I'd planned for our first night.

The kitchen, when we finally got inside, was genuinely lovely - modern but not aggressively so, with a proper cooker and enough workspace to pretend you know what you're doing. I opened the fridge to confirm the obvious emptiness, then did that thing where you check cupboards hoping previous guests left behind something edible. A lone packet of dried soup and some questionable allspice. Not exactly a feast.

We ended up driving to the nearest Co-op, which is about ten minutes away in Vikesa village itself. I love a foreign supermarket, me. Spent far too long in the fish section, marvelelling at varieties I'd never seen, before playing it safe with cod fillets and some pre-marinated pork ribs that claimed to be "traditional." Bought a suspicious quantity of brunost because everyone says you must, plus crispbread that I genuinely believe could survive nuclear apocalypse. Also, crucially, coffee. The proper stuff. My partner had to physically remove me from the cheese aisle.

Back at the house, I attempted to redeem my earlier grocery disaster by cooking something impressive. The pork ribs went into the oven with ambitions of slow-cooked tenderness. What emerged two hours later was technically cooked, yes, but with a texture best described as "educational." We ate them anyway, sitting at the kitchen table with the big windows showing nothing but darkening fields, and they tasted absolutely fine after enough beer. The brunost, meanwhile, was a revelation - sweet, caramelised, completely wrong for everything I tried putting it on, yet weirdly compulsive on plain bread at midnight.

Morning brought proper exploration of local food possibilities. The village shop does excellent breakfast supplies - proper brown bread, local eggs with those almost-orange yolks, butter that actually tastes of something. I fried eggs with increasing confidence, feeling very rural and self-sufficient, though admittedly the hens had done the difficult bit.

We found a farm shop a few miles towards Bjerkreim selling vegetables that still had actual soil on them. Bought potatoes that became the centrepiece of dinner that night, simply boiled with butter and dill I'd spotted growing wild near the property boundary. The cod became fishcakes with varying structural integrity - some held together, others became more of a "deconstructed" situation. All got eaten. The crispbread finally made sense as an emergency vehicle for whatever was left on your plate.

By day three, I'd developed a routine. Morning coffee with that view, planning meals like I actually understood Norwegian cuisine. A trip to the shop for whatever looked interesting. Afternoon attempts at baking with flour I'd found in the cupboard, producing something between bread and cake that we politely called "rustic." Evening cooking with whatever combination we'd assembled, usually involving too much butter and a growing reliance on local dill.

The self-catering life at Vikesa Veen taught me something, I think. Not that I'm any great cook, clearly. More that there's genuine pleasure in the attempt, in making do with what's available, in the small triumph of a decent meal produced from unfamiliar ingredients in an unfamiliar kitchen. The lamb never did get cooked - we saw some actual lambs in a field and I went a bit soft about it. But the pork ribs, the questionable fishcakes, the midnight brunost sessions - they became the real flavour of the holiday. That, and the coffee. Always the coffee.