I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I tried to open someone else's car at Karlshamn station. In my defence, it was the exact same shade of dusty silver as our hire car, and the key fob made that hopeful little click. The actual owner appeared with a tray of coffees and a look of polite Swedish confusion that I can still feel burning into my cheeks. My partner found this hilarious, naturally, and spent the rest of the drive to Asarum doing impressions of me peering into a stranger's boot.

The cottage sat at the end of a narrow lane, all red timber and white trim, looking like something from a children's book. I was still recovering from my car park humiliation when we stepped inside and I immediately forgot everything. The kitchen was the heart of it, a proper country space with a battered wooden table that had clearly hosted decades of breakfasts. Someone had left a jar of cloudberry jam in the fridge, which I took as a peace offering from the universe.

By then it was nearly six, and we were ravenous. The local ICA in Asarum village became our first port of call, a modest supermarket where I wandered the aisles with the dazed expression of someone who recognises nothing on the shelves. We emerged with vasterbottenost, which I can neither pronounce nor resist, some smoked salmon that looked properly local, and a packet of crispbread that I would come to depend upon like a life raft.

That first evening we attempted what I grandly called a "smorgasbord," which mostly involved arranging things on plates and pretending we had planned it. The cottage had no dishwasher, so we washed up looking out at the darkening garden, elbows deep in suds, eating more crispbread as we went. I have never been so content doing something so mundane.

The following morning brought the Karlshamn market, a Tuesday affair down by the harbour. I had read about it in a guidebook and arrived with empty bags and unrealistic ambitions. The reality was better than my research, stalls of early summer strawberries that smelled like actual strawberries, which sounds obvious but rarely happens, and an elderly woman selling pickled herring from plastic tubs who gave me a sample that made my eyes water in the best possible way. I bought a tub of something mustard-dressed, plus new potatoes with their soil still clinging to them, because I have never been able to resist produce that requires washing.

Back at the cottage I attempted proper Swedish potatoes, boiling them with dill in the manner I believed authentic. They were probably wrong in fourteen different ways, but eaten outside at that wooden table with butter melting into their waxy flesh, they tasted like the correctest thing I had ever made. The herring accompanied them, sharp and sweet and completely overwhelming at eleven in the morning, which became our standard holiday lunch time without either of us discussing it.

I should mention my bread attempt. The cottage had a proper oven, and I had visions of producing something rustic and wholesome. What emerged was a dense object that my partner christened "the doorstop," though we ate it anyway, toasted and plastered with that cloudberry jam, because holiday rules apply and nothing is wasted when you are pretending to be a person who bakes.

Evenings became about the fish. We found a smokehouse on the outskirts, nothing fancy, just a shed and some serious expertise. The mackerel we brought back needed nothing except a squeeze of lemon and the garden's evening light. I overcooked it slightly, distracted by a wasp and my own conversation, but the oily richness forgave me. We ate in silence for several minutes, which is my personal benchmark for food success.

The final morning I made pancakes, proper thin Swedish ones, having finally located the correct flour after three attempts. They tore and stuck and generally misbehaved, but rolled with jam and a desperate final scraping of cream, they felt like a proper farewell. We washed up one last time, elbows deep again, and I realised I had spent more time in that kitchen than anywhere else in Blekinge, including the rather pretty coastline that had supposedly drawn us there.

I left the remaining crispbread for the next visitors, a small inheritance. The car park incident felt like weeks ago, belonging to a different person. I was someone who bought herring from strangers now, who boiled potatoes with confidence, who had made peace with failure and eaten it anyway, toasted, with jam.