I have always believed that the truest measure of a holiday is not the views or the sightseeing, but the food you eat along the way. So when my partner and I set off for a week at the Skagen in Kristinehamn, Varmland, I packed an empty stomach and wildly unrealistic ambitions about my own cooking abilities.

The journey from Karlstad airport started well enough. We had hired a car, stocked up on what I considered essential supplies, and set off with a playlist of questionable Scandinavian pop. The trouble began when I insisted we stop at a farm shop I had spotted on a map. "It will be charming," I said. "We will find local treasures," I said. What we found was a gravel car park, a closed sign, and me attempting to reverse out while accidentally scattering a bag of crisps across the back seat. My partner maintains a dignified silence about this to the present day. I maintain that the crisps were already open and gravity did the rest.

By the time we reached the Skagen, I was in that peculiar state of travel hunger where you will eat absolutely anything and convince yourself it is magnificent. The property itself is one of those classic Swedish wooden numbers, painted that particular red that seems to glow in the late afternoon light. We dumped our bags, opened every cupboard with the enthusiasm of treasure hunters, and discovered that the kitchen was actually rather well-equipped. This would prove to be both a blessing and a curse.

That first evening, we did what any sensible person would do after a long journey. We drove the ten minutes into Kristinehamn proper and found a proper meal. A small harbour-side place, nothing fancy, serving fried herring with mashed potatoes and lingonberries. The fish was crisp, the mash was buttery, and I ate it with the kind of focus normally reserved for competitive events. My partner had the meatballs, because of course they did, and spent the entire meal making appreciative noises that I initially found endearing and later recognised as a challenge.

The next morning revealed the true purpose of our kitchen. I had grand plans. Varmland is potato country, dairy country, the sort of place where people have been feeding themselves from forests and lakes for generations. I would honour this tradition. I would cook like a local. I would make a hash, a proper pyttipanna, with whatever I could find.

What I made was a brown, salty mess that tasted primarily of regret and overenthusiastic seasoning. The potatoes were underdone. The onions were caramelised to the point of no return. I had added some local sausage that I found at the ICA supermarket, and that was the single redeeming element, largely because it was impossible to ruin. My partner ate two polite forkfuls, then made toast with the excellent Swedish butter and some cloudberry jam we had found. I ate the entire disaster myself, out of stubbornness, and spent the afternoon drinking slightly too much coffee to compensate.

The ICA became our regular haunt. It is not glamorous, but it is honest. We learned the rhythms of Swedish supermarket shopping, the particular satisfaction of finding good local cheese, the challenge of identifying whether a packet contained cream or something more alarming. I became weirdly invested in their bread selection. The limpa, that dark rye with its faint sweetness, became a daily necessity. We bought smoked fish, pickled vegetables, and once, ambitiously, some preserved herring that I opened in the kitchen and immediately regretted. The smell lingered for hours. We ate outside that evening, not for the pleasant weather, but for survival.

Wednesday brought the Kristinehamn market, a modest affair in the town square that nonetheless felt like an event. We bought new potatoes, still dusty with soil, from a woman who explained at length how her husband grew them. I understood perhaps one word in five, but nodded with what I hoped looked like agricultural expertise. There was fresh dill, there were strawberries that actually tasted of something, and there was a cheese stall where we spent far too long sampling varieties we could not pronounce. We left with bags heavier than our luggage had been, and a determination to cook properly that evening.

That dinner was better. Not good, exactly, but better. Grilled salmon from the lake, new potatoes with dill, a simple salad. The fish was slightly overcooked because I was anxious about undercooking it, but it was recognisably food, and my partner finished their plate without reaching for the bread and jam. I counted this a victory. We ate on the terrace as the light stretched long across the water, and I felt briefly competent, briefly like someone who could exist in this landscape without constant recourse to supermarkets and restaurants.

Of course, this hubris led directly to Thursday's catastrophe. I had found a recipe for traditional Varmland potato dumplings, kroppkakor, filled with pork and onion. How difficult could it be? The answer, established over several sticky, flour-covered hours, was extremely difficult. My dumplings fell apart in the water. The filling escaped. I produced a pan of potato fragments and meat fragments that resembled nothing so much as a failed science experiment. We ordered pizza that night, from a place in town that did surprisingly excellent kebab pizza, which feels like a Swedish culinary tradition that deserves more international recognition. I ate three slices and felt no guilt whatsoever.

By Friday, I had accepted my limitations. We ate breakfast simply, good bread and cheese and coffee, the kind of meal that requires no skill beyond toasting. For lunch, we drove to a lakeside spot and ate the smoked fish and hard bread we had bought at the market, with nothing more complicated than a knife to spread butter. It was probably the best meal of the week. The fish was oily and rich, the bread had the particular resistance of proper rye, and the butter was so good it almost made me angry. Why is butter not this good everywhere? What are other countries doing wrong?

Our final evening, we returned to the harbour restaurant where we had started. I had the herring again, because why change what works, and my partner had a fish soup that they described in such detail I suspected they were trying to make me jealous. We talked about the week, the small disasters and the small triumphs, the way that food anchors memory more reliably than photographs. I will remember that terrible pyttipanna longer than I remember the view from any particular viewpoint. I will remember the market strawberries, eaten in the car because we could not wait, juice staining my fingers.

We left the Skagen with leftover cheese, half a loaf of limpa, and a jar of cloudberry jam that I have been rationing ever since. I also left with a clearer understanding of my own cooking, which is that I should probably stick to assembling rather than creating, and that there is no shame in letting other people, or indeed other countries, do what they do best. The food of Varmland is not complicated. It is fish from clean water, potatoes from good soil, dairy from cows that have actual meadows to wander. My attempts to improve upon this were misguided at best, actively destructive at worst.

I would go back tomorrow, though. I would buy more cheese, more of that ridiculous butter, more berries from whoever will sell them to me. I might even attempt the dumplings again, though my partner has threatened to hide the flour if I so much as mention it. Some lessons take longer to learn than others. The important thing is to keep eating along the way.