I had always fancied myself as the sort of person who could navigate a foreign country with nothing but a phone, a rental car, and misplaced confidence. That delusion lasted precisely until I tried to find our holiday let in Portoroz Parecag. Somewhere between the airport and the Slovenian coast, I managed to turn a forty-minute drive into an hour and a half of increasingly desperate circling through olive groves, convinced I was pioneering a new route. My partner sat beside me, making that particular face of loving patience mixed with hunger-induced fury. We finally spotted the place down a lane I had already driven past three times, the white building half-hidden by cypress trees, and I declared victory as though I had planned the scenic route all along.

The owners had left us a bottle of local Refosk wine and a note suggesting we visit the Piran market that very morning if we wanted the best fish. We were too late, of course, having spent our morning getting gloriously lost. Instead we drove to the Mercator supermarket in Portoroz, which turned out to be a revelation in itself. I had never seen so many varieties of dried sausage in one place. We bought prsut, which the Slovenians cure with the same devotion the Italians give to prosciutto, plus a hunk of Kras cheese that smelled like it meant business. Back at the flat, I attempted to assemble a respectable lunch on the terrace, slicing everything slightly too thick because I was too hungry to care about presentation. The wine helped. It always does.

The kitchen in the flat was compact but properly equipped, which I mention because I have stayed in self-catering places where "kitchen" apparently means a camping stove and a vague hope. Here there was a proper hob, decent knives, and enough pans to actually cook something ambitious. I took this as a challenge. That evening I attempted to recreate a seafood risotto I had eaten years ago in Venice, using frozen mixed seafood from the supermarket because the fish market remained an unvisited dream. The rice went slightly crunchy. My partner said it was "rustic" and ate two bowls, which I choose to interpret as affection rather than starvation.

Breakfast became our triumph. Each morning I walked to the bakery in nearby Parecag, a ten-minute stroll that made me feel pleasingly continental, returning with still-warm kifli, those crescent rolls that manage to be both substantial and delicate. We ate them with butter and cherry jam from the market we finally visited on our third day, held in Piran's main square where elderly women sold produce from gardens I imagined were impossibly picturesque. I bought vegetables I did not recognise and had to Google later, which is how I learned to cook with blitva, a leafy green that behaves like spinach but tastes more interesting.

The market in Piran deserves its reputation. We went twice, early, before the cruise day-trippers arrived. The fishmongers shouted prices in a mixture of Slovenian and Italian, reflecting this borderland history. I bought squid that still smelled of the sea, took them back to the flat, and spent an afternoon learning to clean them properly via YouTube, a process both disgusting and satisfying. Grilled with garlic and parsley on the terrace as the light faded over the salt pans, they were the best thing I ate all week, made sweeter by the labour.

I did attempt one proper failure. Inspired by a restaurant meal of jota, the hearty bean and sauerkraut soup traditional to this region, I tried to make it from memory and optimistic guessing. I used too much sauerkraut. The result was aggressively sour, face-contorting, utterly inedible. We laughed until we cried, ordered pizza from a place in Portoroz that delivered, and ate it on the terrace with more of that Refosk. Some nights are not about culinary achievement. Some nights are about admitting defeat gracefully, surrounded by the smell of someone else's successful cooking drifting from neighbouring terraces.

By the end of the week I had developed a routine. Morning bakery walk, market planning, afternoon cooking with whatever looked good, evening meal on the terrace with wine that cost less than a London coffee. I burned the garlic once, overcooked the pasta twice, and made one soup that will haunt my dreams. But I also learned to cook squid, to appreciate prsut properly sliced thin, to understand that blitva with potatoes is a perfect simple dish. The kitchen in that Portoroz flat saw my genuine efforts and my honest disasters, and the terrace witnessed both with equal Mediterranean indifference. I left slightly heavier, considerably more knowledgeable about Slovenian cheese, and with a new understanding that the best holiday meals are not the perfect ones, but the ones you struggle through, laugh about, and remember precisely because they went slightly wrong.