Hello crime readers, foodies and lovers of terrible puns! Today’s Dining With The Dame comes to us via another short story, Witness For The Prosecution. This story appears in the Hounds of Death collection. We have already featured The Red Signal from this collection. I also have a French version of this story! Today, I am pairing the story with a classic starter, Proscuitto and Melon. We love a twofer here at Dining With the Dame so later this week, we will also be celebrating a very special occasion with a cocktail also inspired by this story.
Witness For The Prosecution- The Plot
“Supposing I tell you that he did not come in that night at twenty past nine, but at twenty past ten? You say that he tells you he knew nothing about the money coming to him. Supposing I tell you he knew all about it, and counted on it, and committed murder to get it?”
Agatha Christie – The Witness for The Proecution
Young, handsome but hard up, Leonard Vole finds himself accused of murdering the elderly lady, Emily French, in order to inherit her wealth. The facts seem stacked against Leonard. Mr Mayherne his solicitor is certain that Leonard is innocent. The only person who can provide an alibi for Leonard is his wife Romaine.
My Mayherne goes to see her, despite knowing that a court is unlikley to give much credence to the evidence of a devoted wife. He gets the a terrible shock when Romaine not only tells him she detests her husband but that he is not actually even her husband! She was married to another man in her home country of Austria but he was locked away in a madhouse so the two could not marry.
Therefore double jeopardy does not apply
She also says that Leonard committed the murder and confessed so to her.
How can Mr Mayherne save Leonard when even his own wife is determined to see him hanged?
The Witness for the Proscution – The Covers
I could not find many covers for Witness for The Prosecution as it is usually part of a collection such as The Hound of Death. We’ll look at some of the playbills and movie posters next time and talk a bit more about the 1957 movie next time.
The Recipe: Proscuitto and Melon
I’m not entirely sure we need a recipe for somerthing as simple as this, but our old friend The A-Z of Cooking has one so here it is!
I decided to sit my melon slices on some Romaine lettuce in honour of Leonard’s wife!
Links To The Christieverse
None that I could find but please let me know if you spotted any!
Other Food & Drinks Mentioned in The Witness for The Prosecution
Brandy
Our June read will be Taken at the Flood. Yay, it’s a Poirot!
How many of you have ever had a horror day on the cooking front? The day when nothing went right? So It was with me when I went to make the “Baked Curly Shells and Proscuitto Cake” recipe from the November 2002 editiion of Super Food Ideas mag. For various reasons, about to be elaborated upon, these morphed into these spicy mac and cheese bites!
Spicy Mac and Cheese Bites – The First Error
The base of the OG recipe was ricotta cheese. I went to the deli section of my local supermarket. “Can I have 250 grams of ricotta cheese please?”
The little gobshite behind the counter (believe me, the truth of this statement will bear out) said. “We don’t have any”.
“Ermmm…..could you check out the back please?
He went out the back but he returned far to quickly to have checked for anything.
“We don’t have any””
Ok. So I was shopping at around 7pm so the proper, non-supermarket, deli was closed. The tubs of ricotta in the dairy aisle were all the size of small swimming pools. I didn’t want to be spending the rest of the week finding recipes to use that much left over riicotta. So I decided to use bechamel, for which I had all the ingredients for at home.
“‘Ok, no worries, can I have 12 slices of proscuitto please?
“‘Of what?”‘
“PROSCUITTO”
Let me be clear, we’re still not at the point where he became a gobshite.
Spicy Mac and Cheese Bites – The Second Error
So I got my proscuitto. Sorry, PROSCUITTO. And headed home. Boiled up my macaroni. Made my bechamel. Mixed my macaroni and bechamel together. It was a little bland. I added some chilli flakes. It’s the Sri Lankan in me. I like things a little spicy. I then went to line my muffin tins with proscuitto. (Just like last weeks cupcakes, I was making smaller versions of these “cakes” to work with my picnic theme.
I opened my pack from the deli and was faced not with proscuitto but with Sopressa! Which is an incredibly spicy salami.
Now my first ever job was in the supermarket deli. Never ever would I have mixed up proscuitto and sopressa!!!! And this my friends, is what made him a gobshite!
But by now it was close to 9pm. I did have the energy to get back in the car, drive back to Woolworths, explain what had happened, swap out the sopressa for proscuitto, drive home…
So I remembered that old Italian adage. “When life gives you sopressa, make….mac and cheese bites anyway”‘.
These little mac and cheese bites were so good! I would probably drop the chilli from the pasta mix when making again though as, with the sopressa they were really quite fiery! They were also good reheated and cold / ambient temperature! So would be great picnic food.
Add the flour to the butter and stir with a wooden spoon for 2 minutes.
Gradually add the milk, whisking all the while to remove any lumps.
Cook, stirring all the time, until the mixture boils and thickens.
Reduce the heat to low and simmer, stirring frequently for 5 minutes or until the sauce is the consistency of custard.
Remove the sauce from the heat, add stir through the cheese. Add salt and pepper to taste. Add a pinch or two of freshly grated nutmeg and some chilli flakes if desired.
Macaroni
Cook the macaroni according to the directions on the packet. You can reduce the cooking time a bit as the macaroni will be baked later.
Heat your oven to 180C.
Mix the cheese sauce into the macaroni.
Grease your muffin tin. I prefer to use a spray for this but you can use butter or olive oil if you prefer.
Line the bottom and sides of each muffin cup with sopressa or proscuitto. Cut the proscuitto into 2 pieces.
Spoon the pasta mixture into the lined muffin cups.
Sprinkle with breadcrumbs
Dot with butter
Place into the oven and cook for 30 minutes or until the tops are nicely browned.
Let sit for a few minutes before removing from the pan.
Let me know if you make either recipe!
Have a great week!
I’m back from my travels through England, France, and Russia…actually I’ve been back nearly four weeks now but things being…well things…have not had the time to put virtual pen to paper to blog. Until now.
Why? Well, first up there was a double whammy of jetlag (landing late on Friday night) and starting a new job (Monday morning). One of those things is exhausting. Both in four days is utterly overwhelming. I spent at least the first ten days in a head-spinning daze and utter exhaustion
Then the last two weeks I have been hitting the gym pretty hard. You know what Charles De Gaulle said about France being a nation of 246 kinds of cheese? Well, I think I tasted every single one of them. With wine to match…and, as a result, I came home a little….ummm….shall we say rounder than when I left? So more exhaustion but of the physical, not the mental kind this time. So, it has felt that there was just no time to write.
But then today I had a revelation ….I could write at lunchtime! So I packed my notebook in my bag and walked down to the riverside to write. I decided the river was the best place because where I work now is kind of a tourist area and you can never find a place to sit in the food court. And I to am too stingy to buy my lunch every day and hence be able to sit in a café to write. So down to the river it was!
We’ll come back to that but whilst we’re talking about being time poor, I thought I would share one of my favourite meals that takes less than ten minutes to prepare. In summer, I eat this, or a version of it at least once a week after the gym.
The ingredients are inspired by a very cute appetizer I read about in a magazine where you wrap slices of plum and slivers of blue cheese in strips of prosciutto. But when we need a meal on the table in under ten, there’s no time for the niceties of wrapping. We’re going to dump some lettuce on a plate (I used rocket, or arugula to my American friends) then add some slices of prosciutto, some slices of plum, some chunks of blue cheese and some pistachios. Dress with a drizzle of oil and balsamic vinegar.
So, my dance class runs from 8 pm to 9 pm, by the time I get home and into the kitchen it’s usually about ten past nine….and voila…here is a salad made and ready to eat by around 18 minutes past. It’s fast, it’s pretty to look and healthy to eat…well-ish.
There’s no real recipe – use whatever greens and cold meat you have. You can sub in peaches or apricots for the plums, goat’s cheese or any other soft cheese for the gorgonzola, and your favourite nuts for the pistachios.
So, let’s head back down to the river to see how the al fresco writing went. It must have been a success because you’re reading this now right?
Well…it was a gorgeous day and so pretty down there. It was exciting. I could be like the impressionist painters who sought inspiration “en plein air”. And I finally I could get some words out. So I wrote a bit. Ate my lunch. Then I got a bit distracted by all the people jogging or running along the path and wondered if maybe that’s what I should be doing. The short answer to that is no. Because not only do I sweat like a maniac when I run but my face goes bright red for about two hours after. I could shower to get rid of the one but there is no getting over that red face. And it’s a new job. I don’t want to be known as the tomato face girl. Then I realised I was there to write, not to get distracted by people going by.
But first, I had to move because I was being attacked by ants.
So I moved. Wrote a bit more. Ate a bit more. Thought about how coincidental it was that I was writing about a salad I make when I am time poor at a time when I was time poor and had to sit by the river to write at lunchtime.
Then I had to move again because a very aggressive seagull kept trying to steal my lunch. It was some leftover turkey meatballs and salad. I don’t think seagulls should be so keen to eat turkey. It’s kind of cannibalism. If I didn’t already hate them, that would have turned me against them. Plus I once saw them trying to attack ducklings at the lake near my house. They are the worst.
So. Third location lucky right? Wrong. I had barely sat down when I put my hand in something that…I really want to say it was a piece of rotten fruit. And you know it’s bad when that’s the best case scenario. I think it was far more likely to be something that a seagull or duck had left behind. Thank goodness I never go anywhere without a handy supply of anti-bac and tissues…
And there ended the great “Let’s see if we can write outdoors” experiment of 2018. Epic fail.
On the upside, on the way back from the river I spotted a far-flung corner of the food court that looked relatively empty. ‘Til next week.
“Hey mambo, mambo Italiano hey, hey mambo mambo Italiano Go go go you mixed up Siciliano All you Calabrese do the mambo like-a crazy”
This week’s dishiest dish has us going to Abruzzo for a Pizza Rustica con Bietola. AKA a savoury tart with chard . But Pizza Rustican con Bietola sounds so much more Italian and glamorous doesn’t it? And it will have you dancing the mambo because it is super tasty!
The recipe comes from Made in Italy by Silvia Colloca which was my choice when we did Italian in the Tasty Reads book club a few months ago.
Before I looked inside this book I had my hater face on. As if some B grade actress was going to have any cooking chops – and bear in mind the Claudia Roden book was one of the other selections. This was going to have to be pretty damn impressive to rival that!
Then I started flicking through and ye-es there were several pictures of Silvia looking both incredibly beautiful and impossibly thin. But it was also filled with what looked like some fabulous recipes and things that were not run of the mill. And everything I have made to date has been delicious.
This has included:
Calimari with Tomatoes and Wine
Woodsman’s Chicken
Herb Frittata with Goat’s Curd
Noodles with Zucchini Blossoms and Saffron Sauce
No Knead Spelt Pizza with Soppressata and Potatoes
Pasta Strips with Slow Cooked Goat Sauce
So, this is proving a pretty solid choice. Yay me! Well, really yay Silvia! But you know, I write a blog and it doesn’t get much more totally self obsessed than that so I guess yay me is valid.
Six Week Challenges – Update
I am still on my 6 weeks of no alcohol although I did take last weekend off! Saturday night we were having lobster – OH. MY. WORD. So good!!!! And there was no way on God’s green earth that I was not having a glass of sparkling with that! And Sunday we went out for a Valentine’s Day dinner to our favourite local Greek restaurant. And again – it would have been churlish not to have a glass of vino! But on the whole it is going well . I haven’t really missed it. I also haven’t felt many of the supposed benefits – weight loss, sleeping better, greater productivity etc.
I have been struggling with the daily meditation. I don’t think I have found the perfect time to do it. In the mornings I am usually too rushed and if i try to do it at night I fall asleep. Two places it did feel “right” were one day I did it as soon as I got home from work so it was a bit of a chance to decompress. The other was one morning when I had parked m car at the station, i just stayed in it and did my ten minutes there.
My new one, started February 15th is a flexibility challenge. Every day I will do a short workout designed to improve my flexibility. I am using the program from Fitivity. I have only done a couple so far and they have been fine but a bit boring. I’m sure they will get more challenging as I progress!
I have been thinking of more that I can do over the next few weeks /months:
No processed food
No sugar
Yoga everyday
No Candy crush
Journalling everyday
Are all on the list.
Reading
Room – Emma Donoghue
I have had this book on my To Be Read shelf for YEARS. And finally now I have taken the plunge and have started it – simply because I want to have read it before I see the film. I am probably 2/3 of the way through and I think it is very well written. There are certain parts that I have found quite confronting and other parts that have annoyed me but once I start reading it I find it difficult to put down. I am still having some problems with starting picking it up and starting it each day though…..
The Apologist – Jay Rayner
This is my current audiobook. Marc Bassett is a merciless restaurant critic. One day a chef commits suicide by roasting himself in his bread oven, leaving Bassett’s review taped to the outside. And so begins his career as the apologist.
I am not very far along with this but I am enjoying it so far.
Watching
My Kitchen Rules
I can’t help myself. I am utterly addicted to this. And the commentary on Flawless Vision.
I have only listened to one episode of this but they hated Girl on The Train almost as much as I did so it’s definitely worth another listen.
Room 101
From time to time I’ve decided to list a few pet peeves on here. Things that I would like to see banished to Room 101. Starting with:
Gluten Free Everything
When you label your bread, cakes and cookies gluten free you are doing a good service for those people who cannot tolerate gluten. When you label products that would never have contained gluten in a pink fit “Gluten Free” you are indulging in a cynical marketing ploy. STOP IT. I swear I saw water labelled gluten free recently. It made me want to break things.
Quinoa
Has no one else noticed how bad this smells as it is cooking. I made some the other day and the smell of it made me gag. I”m never cooking it again.
Cooked.com
I took out an annual subscription for cooked.com. This, for those of you who may not have heard of it is kind of like a netflix for cookbooks. Does anyone else have one of these? Do you find it useful? how long have you had it. Does it help you to choose which cookbooks to buy or do you not buy them anymore? I have not actually cooked anything from the site yet. I guess I’d better start! Stay tuned!
Kitchen Nightmares
I had one kitchen nightmare this week. I was all set to make Vitello Tonnato for bookclub only it was a new style “healthy” VT. So, instead of that gorgeous tuna mayonnaise, my tonnato was made out of tofu, anchovies and parmesan cheese. And it was rank! I have never been one to complain about the smell of parmesan cheese. I remember even in primary school when people would say “Yuck, it smells like sick”, I always thought they were nuts. This abomination of a tonnato not only smelt like but tasted like vomit. It was so bad I couldn’t even give it to the dogs.
Now though, I am craving a proper old school Italiano Vitello Tonnato. It’s a shame Silvia’s book does not have a recipe. However, The A-Z of Cooking does. There will be 1970’s Vitello Tonnato on here very soon. I just have to allow the memory of the horror that was that tofu tonnato to subside a little!
What Silvia’s book does have is this recipe for Pizza Rustica con Bietola. I am obsessed by those words. I keep repeating them in an increasingly bad Italian accent! If you would also like to become obsessed with this lovely tart here is the recipe:
This week I am looking forward to cooking…nothing. Because I have been really busy and not done a single bit of menu planning. However, we have a new Tasty Reads book so I might crack this open and give something a whirl.
Oh and this is is my new favourite you-tube. I have watched it about a million times since I found it.
What was the best thing you’ve made this week? What are you looking forward to cooking? Have you read anything interesting? I would love to hear from you!
But I have a dream. And that dream is to bring the potato salad roll to the world.
Hmm,so I guess I can cross that one off the list and bask in the smugness of a goal for 2015 achieved. And it’s only January 2nd!!!!
But before we get to the Potato Salad Roll…
I’m sure better bloggers than me really think about the messages they want to send when they post their first post of the year…you know, those super organised people who have a theme and a word for the year? And the first post reflects that dream and vision?
I wish I was one of those people. I really do. Because I pretty much know everything I’m going to write about this month and believe me…if we were going to run a theme around January, it would have to be supercalifragilisticexpialidociouslly insane.
Although…maybe getting the crazy out at the start of the year is a good thing. Maybe by the end of the year I’ll be ever so high-brow and Julie and Julia-ing the Larousse Gastronomique…
Yeah, I doubt that too. But you never know…I do own a copy….
And the highly observant of you will notice that it is also still in it’s plastic wrap….
So…the potato salad roll. Hands up how many of you thought this would be potato salad in a bread roll?
Yep, that would be about all of you. Because that would make sense. But remember when I said this month was going to be all about the crazy stupid? I don’t even know where to start with this but they say a picture paints a thousand words so, world, here is the potato salad roll…
Potato Salad Roll
Yeh, it’s kind of a Swiss Roll of Potato Salad. Except without the jam. Not even I’m that weird.
Potato Salad Roll
Basically, it just a potato salad rolled into a log with the dressing on the outside.
Which in no way explains the absolute spontaneous hatred my family felt for it when I brought it for Christmas. The comments ranged from “What the fuck is that? ” to “Who laid the big white poo in the middle of the table?”
I tried to explain that it was potato salad. Comments ranged from
“Not in my world”
To:
“No. It’s not. Potato salad looks and is, delicious. That looks like a big white poo”.
And then there was:
“Why can’t you make normal potato salad? Are you on drugs? I saw a documentary on people taking ice…do you have a problem with methamphetamines?”
I saw the exact same documentary.
There was a man injecting himself in his penis because “it was the only good vein he had left”. ‘
I made a slightly off beat potato salad.
I’m struggling to find the connection.
I was the only person who ate the potato salad roll on Christmas day which was a real shame because despite it’s rather unconventional appearance it was a damn good and tasty potato salad.
Potato Salad Roll 3
On Boxing Day, I made a roll within a roll by wrapping part of the original roll in prosciutto and the same people who has scoffed at the original roll could not wolf it down fast enough.
Go figure….
Potato Salad Prosciutto Rolls
It was kind of nice to end the year with a badly written retro recipe. It’s been a long time between drinks for one of them.
Potato Salad Roll Recipe
First line. Prepare the gherkins, parsley, pimento, eggs and onion…
Onion? What onion? Would that be one of those special invisible onions that don’t appear in the ingredient list? And what I am I supposed to do with my half a cup of diced celery? Use it to pelt my ungrateful family to death?
Despite the shortcomings of the recipe, I am utterly obsessed with the idea of the potato salad roll. I already have two more versions in my head which I will make and post some time in the future. Maybe I will make 2015 the year of the Potato Salad Roll….huh…maybe I am, albeit unwittingly, one of those people who have a theme. And a vision.
I mean, yeah, I totally am. This was all planned. Months in advance….
I will be spending my week preparing my potato salad roll vision board.
