I have never been so relieved to see a Tesco bag in my life, and I do not even shop at Tesco. There it was, stuffed under the passenger seat of our hire car, crumpled and slightly ashamed, containing precisely three tea bags, a half-empty packet of digestives, and a jar of Marmite I had sworn I would not bring. My partner raised an eyebrow. "Emergency rations?" she said. I nodded grimly. We were an hour into our drive from Ljubljana Airport when I realised I had left the actual shopping bag on the kitchen counter in Nottingham. The one with pasta, olive oil, and something approaching a plan. So the Tesco bag became my culinary security blanket, my pathetic little link to civilisation, as we wound through the Slovenian countryside toward Celje Lasko in Savinjska.

The property sits on a hillside above Lasko, and I will be honest, my first attempt at parking nearly ended in a low-speed encounter with a walnut tree. The gravel crunched in that satisfying way that says "you have arrived somewhere properly rural," and then the tree appeared, looming with what I can only describe as arboreal judgement. I reversed, adjusted, reversed again, and finally abandoned the car at an angle that would have failed my driving test. The house, though, made me forget my shame. Wooden balconies, proper shutters, that particular stillness of somewhere with more trees than people. I stood there with my Tesco bag and felt simultaneously ridiculous and profoundly at peace.

The kitchen became my immediate obsession, as it always does. I am one of those people who judges a holiday by its cooking potential, and this one did not disappoint. Proper gas hob, decent knives, enough pots to attempt something ambitious. I opened the fridge with the confidence of a man who had brought three tea bags and a jar of Marmite. The shelves stared back, empty and expectant. "Right," I said, to no one in particular. "Market."

Lasko's market, we discovered, happens on Saturday mornings in the old town centre. We arrived late, flustered, still smelling of airport and car. The stalls were already packing down, but a woman selling honey took pity on us. Through gestures and my terrible Slovenian, we acquired a jar of something dark and foresty, a loaf of bread that weighed approximately the same as a bowling ball, and some cheese that the woman kept touching to her heart, which I chose to interpret as endorsement rather than medical complaint. We also found tomatoes that actually smelled of tomatoes, which in Britain feels like encountering a unicorn.

Back at the house, I attempted my first self-catering triumph. The tomatoes, sliced thick, with the honey drizzled over and some of the cheese crumbled on top. My partner watched me with the patient expression of someone who has seen my cooking experiments before. "It's a bit... deconstructed," she said, which is partner-code for "where is the actual meal." I defended it as rustic. She made toast.

The local shops in Lasko proper became our daily pilgrimage. A tiny supermarket with an inexplicably excellent wine selection, a butcher who eventually learned to recognise my hopeful pointing, a bakery where we developed a serious addiction to something called potica, which is essentially walnut roll and should probably be regulated. I attempted to make one myself on our fourth day, following a recipe I found on my phone with ingredients I had mostly identified correctly. The result was edible, technically, but had the structural integrity of wet cardboard. We ate it anyway, with wine, on the balcony, watching the light change over the valley. Some failures taste better than successes.

The kitchen at Celje Lasko saw my best and worst efforts. A decent goulash on day six, after I finally located proper paprika. A catastrophic attempt at freshwater fish that I will not discuss in detail. The Marmite remained unopened, a silent reproach, as I learned to cook with local ingredients I could barely name. The Tesco bag stayed under the sink, forgotten, until our final morning when I found it while packing. Three tea bags, half-empty digestives, that jar. I laughed, properly, for the first time in ages. My partner asked what was funny. I said nothing, really, just me, just this, just the gap between what we plan and what we actually do, and how sometimes the unplanned tastes better anyway.