Cottleston Pie

A while ago, I learned about The Soup Peddler from a friend of mine, Gopi. We thought we should try some of his soup sometime.

It's an unusual operation. You have to order exactly what you want by Friday the week before you want to eat. Then, you can have it delivered, chilled, to your door in several areas in Austin on certain days of the following week, or you can go pick it up at Peddler HQ in south Austin.

What you order is what you get. No more. The menu changes each week and something offered once might not be offered again for a long time, if ever.

On a Thursday in late September, we went down to Book People where the Peddler himself, aka David Ansel, was presenting and signing his new book, Soup Peddler's Slow and Difficult Soups: Recipes and Reveries. Gopi bought the book. We still hadn't actually had any soup.

The next day, Friday, we arranged soup. I'm too far north to have it delivered, and was leaving town Thursday afternoon, so I arranged to pick it up Monday. This seemed a perfect opportunity to make a Austin event of it, so we did.

The crowd that particular evening included Gopi's brother Shankar, long time friends and neighbors Fred and MJ, and Ann, a friend of recent vintage.

We had Cioppino and Soupe au Pistou Les Montilles soups. They were both excellent, served together with saltines and oyster crackers (we had both on hand), baguette for soup sopping, and red and white wines.

Calling cioppino an Italian soup is like calling chop suey Chinese food.  It's only part of the story. This seafood stew came from the immigrant-staffed galley kitchens of San Francisco's fisherman's wharves.  Of course, nowadays it's served with white cloth napkins and fine wine.  It's another chapter in the epic story of how low culture feeds high culture, especially in the world of culinaria.

Ingredients: fish stock, shrimp, chopped clams, cod filet, carrot, celery, mushroom, green bell pepper, onion, red pepper flake, tomato paste, savory, thyme, basil, parsley, olive oil, salt, pepper

Les Montilles is a idyllic little mas, or farm, in the alluvial plains of Provence.  It was there that I was taught this, one of the planet's great soups.  Pistou is a not-so-close French relative of Italian pesto,  and it adds a bright, incomparable flavor to this hearty vegetable, bean, and pasta soup. Many thanks to Annie Marbat, pictured above, for demonstrating this recipe to me, so that I could bring it to the Soupies.  This soup requires no accompaniment, but a glass of pastis, three parts water, is the recommended aperitif.

Ingredients: leeks, tomato, zucchini, green beans, red beans, macaroni pasta, potato, carrot, basil, garlic, olive oil, salt

I also got porc provencale, which I thought was a soup too when ordering. But it wasn't. It was an entree of prepared pork loin with an accompanying sauce. It was good too, but not as outstanding as the soups. The Peddler mentioned at his book presentation how his business has been growing and branching out to offer complementary non-soup items recently.

Pigs and Frenchmen have long been at odds here in Austin... Monsieur Jean Pierre Isidore Dubois, the chargé d'affaires of the French Legation, started the infamous Pig War of 1841. A neighboring innkeeper (at 6th and Guadalupe) let his pigs roam freely through downtown, and their frequent visits to Dubois' stables ignited his ire and led to open fighting in the streets. We offer this dish in those pigs' honor...

I got a baguette from the Peddler too, but I don't think that I could tell the difference between that baguette and one from the local HEB bakery. It was a bit pricey too.

The soups were good enough that I'd journey to south Austin to get those same soups again, if I could.

The soups being served this week looked mighty tempting too, and I would have ordered them for myself for this coming Thursday, but I forgot to order them by Friday! Urgh! And the soups being offered this week for serving next week aren't nearly so tempting.

Update less than an hour after I originally posted: Well, whatd'yaknow. I just got email from the Peddler. He just added one more zip code for delivery...mine! "We'd like to announce a new delivery zip code... 78759. Welcome aboard. Your frequent, devoted trips down MoPac are no more. While we're honored that you'd go to such lengths (during rush hour, no less) to patronize our little business, we think it's better for all concerned if we just come up there and deliver. Your delivery day will be Friday ..."

On Friday a week ago, I got a call from security at work: "your car has been involved in an accident in the parking lot." As I descended the stairs, I had an unpleasant guess as to what happened, and, it turned out, I was right.

Before coming into the office building that morning, I'd sat in my car for a few minutes listening to a radio news item about hurricane Rita. Since the engine was running with the AC on, I'd shifted into neutral. Did I remember to put on the parking brake (aka emergency brake)?

As I gazed out at the parking lot, I saw the answer was "probably not," since my car wasn't where I'd parked it. Okay, so it rolled somewhere. I looked around, but couldn't see it. Security had said that they had someone at the accident site. So I looked around for a security person in a tan shirt or a security vehicle. I had an unpleasant feeling as I wandering into the neighboring lot and finally found my car, about, maybe 100 yards (90 meters) away.

My car had managed to skirt by some cement parking stops to cross into the next lot. Then it had hit a minivan which deflected it into a tree trunk, where it had finally come to rest. Thank goodness for the tree. If it hadn't been there, it would have rolled down into a large, ~4 foot (1.3 m) deep, drainage ditch. That would have been ugly. The tree didn't even leave a scratch.

Oh, and my car did an about-face on its journey, facing the opposite direction when it stopped. (My green route on the map doesn't contemplate how that happened...)

The owner of a the minivan was eventually located and came out and joined the security guard and I at the scene. She was a Vietnamese woman who worked in the same building and seemed a bit mystified by the whole event.

Fortunately, the damage to her minivan was minor since my car's bumper had hit it right in the middle of the front bumper at an angle. (It was good our bumpers matched hight! If either had been a big SUV or pickup, it all would've been worse.) The front bumper cover would clearly need replacing, but that was probably it. My own car's damage was worse because the corner of the bumper had hit the minivan, so the side panel had been scratched and bent such that it affected my opening the driver's side door.

The security guard started explaining the situation to her: we should exchanges insurance info; we could call APD (Austin Police Dept) if we wished but it was on private property and they might fill out a report, if they sent out anyone at all, but that was likely to be it; he would be filing his own paperwork which would be available shortly in case we or our insurance companies wanted it.

At this point, I respectfully took control because it was bad enough without eating up a whole day. I gave her a copy of my insurance card and didn't take her insurance info -- it was clearly entirely my fault. I said we shouldn't call APD because it was a waste of time (back in ~2000 someone ran into me in a parking lot, and after waiting a long time for APD, an officer finally showed up and gave us a blue form to fill out ourselves and mail in for statistics only; the driver that ran into me didn't take responsibility and I ended up paying for my own repair).

I immediately drove across the street to my insurance agent to set the wheels in motion to fix this little mess. Turns out that I should have taken her contact info because my insurance company needed it to call her and tell her to get her car fixed such that they'd pay. It wasn't a big mistake. I just drove back to the office and called my agent back with the info.

This past week, I had my car fixed by Rebreu Body & Frame again. And that all worked out well again.

As I was inspecting my car, I noticed a large-ish dent on the rear passenger side and also some small ripple-like-dents right behind the rear wheel well on that same corner. I've no idea when that happened, though it had to have been after my little run-in with Jesus last October. I can't imagine I would have missed the dents if Rebreu had failed to fix them back then. The dents also probably didn't occur during this accident (though there's the mystery of exactly how my car turned itself around).

I had Gene at Rebreu look at the dents. At first take, he thought it looked serious, like something had hit my car a lot harder than, say, a car door, and that my car would need a body-pull to fix structural damage. But further inspection revealed to him that there didn't seem to be any such damage. There was no evidence beyond the dent of any impact. And the paint wasn't even scratched on my rear dumper or anywhere around the dents. Very strange.

Gene gave me an estimate on getting those dents fixed, ~$850. Since it didn't appear to be the same accident, I imagined my insurance company would consider it a separate claim with another deductible payment. Ouch. So, since it's just minor cosmetic dent, I'll just wait for someone to run into my car's rear-end again.

This all reinforces the idea that it makes little sense to have a car that's particularly nice on the outside. Of course, winter salt followed by mud season in Maine had given me this same practical idea long ago.