The drive up to Vaesternorrland took the best part of a day, and by the time I spotted the turn-off for the Hoega Kusten, I was absolutely famished. My partner had insisted on navigating, which meant three hours of "helpful" comments about my lane discipline while she squinted at her phone. We finally rattled down the gravel track to our Skaersaetter, both of us giddy with relief, and I promptly tripped over the doorstep with our entire bag of groceries. Six eggs survived. The other six became a rather abstract installation on the porch. My partner just looked at me, sighed, and said, "Well, at least the omelette's off."

That first evening set the tone for our entire approach to eating at the place. The kitchen in the Skaersaetter was surprisingly well-equipped, which I took as a personal challenge. I had grand plans of cooking proper Swedish meals, channeling my inner Nordic chef. Reality arrived swiftly. I attempted to make something resembling a local fish stew with what I could salvage, plus a jar of something pickled I'd grabbed at a petrol station near Sundsvall. The result was edible, barely, and we ate it on the little wooden deck watching the light fade over the forest. My partner was kind enough to call it "rustic." I called it a learning experience.

The next morning, properly desperate for decent food, we drove the few miles to the nearest proper settlement. There was a small market, more of a cluster of stalls really, where an elderly woman sold cloudberries she'd foraged herself. I bought a jar of her jam on impulse, mostly because she looked so unimpressed with my attempts at Swedish that I wanted to prove myself a worthy customer. That jam became the cornerstone of our breakfast routine. We found a bakery that did proper cardamom buns, still warm, and for three mornings running we constructed elaborate breakfasts on the Skaersaetter's kitchen table. Cloudberry jam on everything. Cloudberry jam in yoghurt. Cloudberry jam eaten directly from the jar at midnight while staring into the fridge, contemplating existence.

Self-catering, I discovered, reveals uncomfortable truths about oneself. I am apparently the sort of person who buys interesting-looking root vegetables with no plan whatsoever. The local shop had something called "palsternacka" which I confidently assumed was a parsnip. It was not, quite, and my roasted vegetable medley on night four had a distinctly aniseed undertone that divided the household. My partner pushed hers around her plate with diplomatic precision. I ate mine with stubborn determination, refusing to admit defeat. The leftovers became soup the next day, blended beyond recognition with a generous amount of the cloudberry jam's sister, a lingonberry preserve that could make practically anything taste definitively Swedish.

We found a smokehouse not far from the property, down a track that our hire car protested against vigorously. The man running it had been smoking fish since before I was born, and he sold us a side of cold-smoked salmon that made my petrol station pickled jar situation feel like a distant embarrassment. That salmon became our triumph. We ate it with dense rye bread from another local baker, with butter that actually tasted of something, with thin slices of red onion and a squeeze of lemon. We ate it for lunch on the rocks near the water, wrapped in jumpers against the wind, feeling absurdly pleased with ourselves.

By our final evening, I had settled into a comfortable rhythm with the Skaersaetter kitchen. I was never going to be brilliant, but I was competent enough to fry herring without filling the house with smoke, to boil potatoes properly, to assemble a respectable plate of local cheese and cold cuts that we could pick at while the light lingered. My partner produced a surprisingly good dessert from some bilberries we'd found, stewed simply with sugar and served with cream. We sat on that same porch where I'd murdered the eggs, now companionably full, and I admitted that perhaps I should have started simpler and built up. She admitted that perhaps she should have offered to drive some of the way. We both knew neither admission would change anything, which was rather the point of a holiday like this.