I have never been so pleased to see a packet of biscuits in my life. Three hours after leaving Copenhagen, two wrong turns round Karlskrona, and one spectacular argument with a sat nav that insisted our holiday cottage was in the middle of the Baltic Sea, we finally crunched up the gravel drive to Norje. I leapt out of the car, promptly tripped over a rogue paving stone, and sent my carefully packed cool bag flying across the lawn. Out slid the emergency bourbon creams, skittering towards a rather startled-looking hedgehog. Welcome to Blekinge.

The cottage itself was proper Swedish idyll territory. Red wooden cladding, white trim, a deck that practically begged for a glass of something cold. But I was not thinking about the view. I was thinking about the fact that we had no milk, no bread, and a fridge that contained nothing but a half-empty bottle of ketchup left by some previous optimist. The self-catering dream was off to a shaky start.

Morning brought salvation in the form of Solvesborg's Saturday market. We pottered down harbour-side, me still slightly limping from my paving stone encounter, and found stalls heaped with the sort of produce that makes you embarrassed about your usual supermarket sweep. New potatoes still dusty with soil. Cloudberries that looked like tiny amber jewels. Smoked fish from the archipelago, curled and glistening, smelling of proper craft rather than factory processing. I bought far too much, as one does, convinced I would transform into some sort of Nordic domestic goddess.

Back at the cottage, reality bit. I had grand plans for a crayfish supper, having spotted a chap selling them live from a tub. What I had not spotted was my complete inability to dispatch a crustacean with any dignity whatsoever. There was a brief, chaotic scene involving a large pot, some regrettable language, and a crayfish that made a break for freedom across the kitchen worktop. My partner retreated to the deck with a beer and a policy of non-intervention. I eventually produced something edible, though I suspect the neighbours heard more than they bargained for.

The local shops became my salvation and my education. The ICA in Solvesborg taught me that Swedish crispbread comes in approximately seven hundred varieties, each more baffling than the last. I became weirdly obsessed with filmjolk, drinking it with every meal like a convert to a minor religion. The bakery near the harbour did these cardamom buns, knotted and glossy, that I would fetch each morning as reward for surviving another self-catering challenge.

I attempted gravlax after finding dill growing wild near the cottage. The result was passable, though I discovered too late that I had been curing it in a dish previously used for garlic. The fusion no Scandinavian would recognise. We ate it anyway, on that deck, watching the light do extraordinary things across the water as evening came on.

By week's end I had produced one genuinely decent meal: simply grilled mackerel from the morning catch, new potatoes with butter and dill, those cloudberries spooned over ice cream. Nothing clever. Everything local. We ate slowly, scraping plates, watching the hedgehog reappear to investigate whether further biscuits might be forthcoming.

I came to Norje expecting to be conquered by scenery. Instead I was quietly undone by trying to feed myself properly, by the small honest labour of it, by food that tasted of somewhere specific. The bourbon creams, it turned out, had been an omen. Some holidays are about becoming who you wish to be. Others are about making peace with who you actually are: slightly incompetent, overly ambitious in markets, but genuinely happy with fish on a plate and dusk coming on.