American Gods Table, Feeding Hannibal

I was having a bit of trouble with re-writes of my current children’s book, so when the food styling job for Hannibal came up, I jumped at it. Nice way to blow the cobwebs out of my brain, I thought.
Understatement.

Hannibal dines alone,
but in the darkness beyond
toil a crew and many cooks.

Gravel crunched as I steered my battered hatchback into the compound. Behind me, the chain-link gate rumbled closed with a thud. Above, the guard eyeballed my license then waved me on as if I were an annoying insect.

Visiting the family felon at Folsom? No. This high security is all about pork.

“Here to pick up the lungs,” I said, thrusting my documents at the gatekeeper.

“Food stylist?” He seemed oddly familiar with the term.

“Yes, for a new tv series we’re shooting called Hannibal,” I said, knowing the words “tv” “shoot” and “Hannibal” will open all doors. In this city, people love the film industry and will bend over backwards to help. Several horror films are being shot locally and I’m probably not the only one shopping at the neighborhood slaughterhouse for fake brains and human-sized organs.

“Hannibal,” he considered. “Like, the cannibal? He eats people, right?”

“He’s a connaisseur of human offal and a gourmet chef,” I said defensively. I had read an early draft script of the Hannibal pilot and was thrilled with the character I was to help portray through the food he cooked and ate. Urbane, educated and rich but unforgivably evil. He’s intriguing.

Watch out, they say:
Hannibal will steal your heart
-- and your liver and lungs…

The script called for close-ups of fresh human organs. Well, almost human. Thank goodness pork hearts, lungs and livers are almost indistinguishable from those of people. I could use them in the show to stand in for Dead Girl de Jour parts. Lucky for me, there’s a pork abbatoir 5 minutes from my studio. Anyway, I had made the hundred phone-calls, signed the mile-long paperwork in triplicate, shown my ID, given my first-born and was here for my hot lung. (Hot is what they call it when it is fresh off the kill floor. I did the crossword with the guard while I waited for it to chill to regulation temperature.)

The best thing about cooking for Hannibal is the challenge of the unknown. My studio kitchen has been full of discovery. The lung turned out great. Not surprising, as it is wonderful in German Sour Lung Soup, as well as Dinuguan, a yummy dish my Filipini neighbor makes.

If you decide to cook up some lung, a warning: if you frighten easily, don’t try to vacuum-pack any fresh whole lung you may have left over. It balloons up in a way that threatens to blow up the house. I know, who has leftover lungs? But you buy them in pairs and you might not want to cook both lungs. Just wrap ‘er up and hello, Frigidaire. Three months later, when your loved ones are clamoring for more Lung Bourguignonne, you’ll have spare body parts at the ready! For those less likely to love lung, I’ve also included a recipe for liver.

TV Dinners :
Get out your pans
for a serial cook-along
with Dr Lecter

Lung and Loin Bourguignonne

Veal lung is best for this dish as it its more delicate in flavor but it is not as widely available as beef lung which is sold by most Asian butchers. Pork lung is great if you can get it. Or just skip the lungs and double the amount of beef tenderloin. For the first episode of Hannibal, celebrity chef Jose Andres, our illustrious food consultant, has Hannibal cooking Lung au Vin based on Julia Child’s Coq au vin. The “au vin” recipe here is simpler and based on Beef Bourguignonne. Prepare the lung for cooking by soaking it, cubed, in salt-water overnight in the fridge. Squeeze out the water before cooking. Serves 4

Wine sauce:

¼ lbthick cut bacon , cut in ¼-inch strips
4 Tbsp butter
4 shallots, minced
2 cups red wine
2 cups veal stock
1/4 cup flour
to taste salt, pepper

Lung and Loin

4 Tbsp olive oil
1 lb veal or pork lungs, trimmed of tracheal tubes and cut in 1-inch cubes
1 lb beef tenderloin, trimmed and cut in 1-inch pieces
2 cup Portobello mushrooms, trimmed and cut in ½-inch slices
12 baby red onions, peeled and par-boiled
1 cup baby carrots, par-boiled

1. In a large deep frying pan, heat butter over medium-high heat. Add bacon and fry until lightly browned and fat has been released. Add shallots and sauté til soft.
2. Add flour and stir to make a roux. Cook until lightly browned.
3. Stir in wine and stock, whisking to smooth out any lumps of roux and cook, stirring frequently, until thickened. Set aside.
4. In a large sauté pan, heat 2 tsp olive oil. Season beef with salt and pepper, add to pan and sauté til medium rare. Remove from pan. Wipe pan dry with paper towel and return to heat with 2 tsp olive oil. Add lung and brown, stirring constantly til browned but not releasing too much liquid. Remove from pan. Wipe pan dry and return to heat. Add 2 tsp olive oil and half of the mushrooms. Saute til mushrooms begin to release moisture. Remove from pan and repeat with remaining mushrooms.
5. Return wine sauce to heat and bring to boil. Add pearl onions and carrots and simmer til tender. Add lungs, beef and mushrooms and simmer just til heated through but beef still medium-rare.
6. Serve with herbed rice or buttery mashed potatoes.

Photo credit: Paul Rozario

Lung: done.

Next: liver die trying.

By Scene 45, Hannibal, ever the curious gourmet, has ended up with a bit of liver that he needs to make into something meaningful. We’ve all done that – compulsively picked up something interesting in the shops and now, at home in the kitchen, staring at that exotic purchase thinking: OK, how will I work that into the kids’ dinner? Maybe I’ll just tell them it’s chicken…

Tandoori Liver

A spicy twist on an old favorite, Liver and Bacon, this dish is sensational served with saffron rice and a cooling dollop of sour cream or yoghurt. Tandoori spice mix can substitute for smoked paprika.
Serves 4

1 lb sliced liver, veal or pork, soaked in milk for 4 hours in the fridge
2 Tbsp smoked paprika or tandoori spice mix
3 Tbsp sour-milk kibe, ghee or cultured butter
1 Tbsp finely chopped shallots
to taste salt
2 oz braised pork belly, in 1/8-inch thick slices
3 Tbsp orange marmalade jelly
2 Tbsp lemon juice

1. In a small bowl, combine marmalade and lemon juice. Set aside. Heat sauté pan over medium-high heat and brown pork belly slices on both sides. Add marmalade mixture to pan and toss to coat evenly. Heat until marmalade starts to bubble and reduce. Set aside in warm oven.
2. Drain liver and dredge in smoked paprika, coating both sides heavily. Heat sauté pan over medium-high heat. Add 1 Tbsp of the butter. When butter is bubbling, add liver slices to the pan and fry for 1 minute, turn and fry other side for an additional 2 minutes, or until meat is medium-rare. Remove from pan to a covered warm platter. With a paper towel, wipe sauté pan clean of any burned spices and repeat with remaining slices.
3. When all liver slices have been cooked, arrange on serving platter, top with pork belly slices and drizzle any remaining marmalade glaze over liver slices.

Next week: Lovely loins for two in a red, red sauce

Hannibal feeds Jack
a meal of thighs for two.
Others wait in rooms beyond.
Boned. Wrapped tight. Frozen.
Meals for another day.

Reading the production draft of Amuse-Bouche, Episode 2 of Hannibal, I get drawn into the action – the fear, the shock, the sudden plot turns. I forget I’m the food stylist – I’m supposed to be looking for the food scenes. I break into a nervous sweat when I read the part where the mushroom men are discovered.

I don’t mind occasionally examining a piece of toast to see if I can see the face of Mary, but after reading this script, I am afraid to look in my fridge in case I see a nose in the box of Shemeiji mushrooms I've been harbouring.

But I must look, because I need to check out the pork loin I’m using to simulate a Roast of Girl. I am designing the menu for Hannibal’s dinner with Jack – a roast loin of pork, he lies. I am learning that Hannibal lies about everything – except perhaps when he invites Jack to bring his wife over, saying, “ I‘d love to have you both for dinner.”

I call my nephew who is a sports medicine intern. “Hey Jay, are there any muscles on a woman that are big enough to make into a roast?” Thighs, he thinks. OK. I email my niece who is a physiotherapist. “How big is the thigh bone?” About 1 ½ inches diameter by 18 inches long, Chantelle says. Check. Of course, I cross-reference with Dr. Google.

To simulate a woman’s thigh, my pork roast will be about 3 inches in diameter by 10 inches long. Made from 3 different thigh muscles, it will be stuffed and bound.

Jose Andres has gone over my sketches and menu and made some mouth-watering suggestions (crystallized apple garnish, Cumberland sauce) and sends me an inspiring photo of his glorious bone-in rib roast.

I decide to stuff the roast with a spinach/mushroom crumb to honor the mushroom men who are growing in the backs of fridges everywhere. Then I’ll completely wrap the roast with slices of proscuitto – to make it look like it has a thin skin.

Maybe a pear compote to dress the table, some scorched red tomatoes clinging to their burnt stems. And some frenched green beans.

A food stylist always has to include something that the actors can eat take after take after take -- usually a vegetable cut in small pieces so they won’t find themselves with a mouthful of food when it’s time to say their lines. Green beans will work here. Lawrence Fishburne, who is playing Jack Campbell, can’t eat nuts, kiwis or eggplant. Mads Mikklesen, our Hannibal, will eat anything – with great relish.

OK, OK - I know this is from episode one but I just got the link today and it’s so pink!

Enough, watching Mads cook. Get out your knives, it’s time to cook along with your favourite cannibal.

Here’s my recipe for episode 2:

Roast Veal stuffed with Spinach and Mushrooms.

Why veal? Because, according to William Seabrook, that’s what human flesh tastes like. Back in the 30s, he was a reporter for The New York Times and, in researching cannibalism, asked a friend who was interning at the Sorbonne to procure for him a piece of healthy human flesh. He cooked it up and promptly declared it to be stringy but delicious – and tasting exactly like a good piece of veal. So instead of the pork that Hannibal claims he is serving to Jack, we are substituting veal. With zeal. To the kitchen!

serves four

4 10-oz bags of spinach, washed and trimmed
½ cup butter
1 ½ lb mushrooms, sliced ¼ inch
¾ tsp crushed garlic
1 ½ tsp salt
1 tsp ground pepper
1 ¼ cupsdry breadcrumbs
1 2-lb veal strip loin
2 oz thinly sliced pork fat

1. Place a half bag of spinach in a plastic zipper bag. Zip partially closed, leaving opening for steam to escape. Microwave for 1 minute. Remove to a strainer to drain. Place drained spinach in cheeesecloth and squeeze dry. Set aside. Repeat with remaining spinach.
2. In a sauté pan over highheat, melt 2 – 3 Tbsp butter and add about 1 cup of the mushrooms. Cook until moisture is released from mushrooms and re-absorbed. Season to taste with garlic, salt and pepper. Remove from pan and repeat with remaining mushrooms.
3. Preheat oven to 400°.
3. In a food processor, combine half of the spinach, mushrooms and breadcrumbs. Pulse until finely chopped and combined. Remove and repeat with remaining.
4. With a sharp slicing or boning knife, slice a pocket in the veal to within ½ inch of the sides. Season inside of this pocket with salt and pepper and stuff with spinach/mushroom mixture. Transfer to a roasting pan and place slices of pork fat on top.
5. Roast for 20 minutes or until veal is medium-rare. Rest for 15 min before slicing. Serve with Cumberland Sauce.

Cumberland Sauce

1 cup frozen raspberries, thawed and pressed through a sieve to remove seeds
1 orange Juice and zest
2/3 cup port
1 Tbp red currant jelly
pinch cayenne

Combine all ingredients in a small saucepan and bring to boil over medium heat. Lower heat to simmer until reduced by a third.

Next week: A groaning table of Head Cheese, Liver Pate, Galantine of Girl, Carpaccio and a delightful Charcuterie Platter showcases Hannibal’s culinary talents. You'll enjoy his skill as gracious host. Unless you are a vegetarian. Or a slim young brunette with a wind-chaffed complexion….

Limbs and antlers

A horrid tangle.

Matted hair.

Spatter.

Viscera.

No one dines tonight.

The script for episode 3 is totally horrifying: there’s no food!!!! It’s a food stylist’s worst nightmare.

But there are stags and does galore bounding in and out of the corridors of the mad minds in this episode. So it seems right to give you a recipe for venison stew to ruminate over.

Then, to fill up the rest of this week’s entry, I’ll share with you some shots and stories from the amazing shoots that SonyNBC did for their Hannibal promos and EPKs (electronic press kits).

Get Set

Here is the set being prepped. Eagle-eyed fans of the show will notice that the dining room is not quite the same as Hannibal’s. We completely re-created the set in another studio so the camera would see exactly what was in the art director’s eye.

Some of the dishes on Hannibal’s table: Octopus and its babies eating crow; Kidney and sausage pie (to honor the pies of Bryan Fuller’s wonderful Pushing Daisies): Papaya spewing Heart Tartare onto pastry puffs.

Playing with your food

It’s the unspoken part of the food stylist’s professional work ethic: – you must play with the food after the shoot. So here I am, hamming it up and strumming the $2,000.00 Jamon Iberico from Episode 7. The famed black hoof has, sadly, been cut off by customs so, for our shoot, I sculpt a fake foot for the salted beast out of wax and shoe polish. With the red cord that identifies the Jamon as top grade, the leg could almost be that of a Spanish dancer wearing a patent leather Manolo Blahnik stiletto.

photo courtesy Sharon Seto

Hannibal cleans up en Espanol

This promo (click here) just makes me laugh. Something about that tiny Dyson removing invisible crumbs is so perfect for Hannibal. And it is such a contrast to handling mountains of dishwashing and lugging of tubs of water and bagging pails of garbage and incinerating offal and hours of scrubbing and sweeping that go on in my studio kitchen and the set kitchen every time Hannibal lifts that fork of his.

As promised, a recipe for your stag party:

Venison Stew

This recipe will serve 6 to 8. You could serve half of it as stew with buttery mashed potatoes and a warm crusty bread and then make the rest into Pot Pies to freeze for another day. Stagger the stag so to speak.

Marinade:

2 cups red wine

1 cup red wine vinegar

1/2 cup gin (optional)

½ cup olive oil

1 Tbsp chopped garlic

6 juniper berries, crushed

1 tsp black pepper, crushed

1 tsp Italian oregano, rubbed

¼ tsp rosemary

3 lb venison cut into 1-inch cubes

3 Tbsp flour

8 slices bacon cut in 1-inch pieces

3 Tbsp olive oil

2 cups veal stock

1 medium onion, cut in ¼-inch slices

3 medium carrots, cut in 1-inch pieces

3 medium parsnips, cut in 1-inch pieces

½ cup chopped pitted prunes

1. In a large bowl, combine all marinade ingredients and add venison. Marinate in fridge for 4 hours.

2. Preheat oven to 325º. Drain venison, reserving liquid. Pat venison dry with paper towels. Dredge in flour. In a large saute pan, heat 1 Tbsp olive oil over medium high heat, add a third of the venison and fry just until brown. Remove to a Dutch oven or other large, heavy baking dish with lid. Repeat until all venison is browned. Add reserved marinade liquid, beef stock and prunes to baking dish, cover and bake for 1 ½ hour or until meat is tender.

3. In sauté pan, fry bacon over medium-high heat until fat is rendered. Remove bacon and set aside, leaving fat in pan. Add onions to pan and sauté until golden and translucent. Set aside. Add carrots and parsnips to pan and brown lightly. Add to baking dish along with bacon and onions. Add water if necessary – liquid should just cover the meat. Return baking dish to oven with lid on and bake for another ½ hour or until vegetables are soft and meat is tender. Add salt if necessary.

Next week: Foie pas -- forcing liver on the dinner guests

Jack’s wife’s liver

Foie gras

faux pas.

Pass on that cruel plate

Take a pass

or pass away?

I cheat when I’m reading mystery novels, skipping to the last chapter to find out whodunit. So it’s not surprising that when I go through a new script, I read all the Kitchen and Dining Room scenes first. To a food stylist, the most suspenseful part is wondering how many scenes have food. Slaying? Flaying? Betraying? Who cares…cut to the food!!!

No need for sneak-peeking at the “Coquilles” script. The forks are out in the teaser (that scene just after the titles that hooks you before you have a chance to change the channel).

But before I get into this week’s food, I want to explain that the episode that was scheduled to air as episode 4 is now being shown only on-line. It’s not being broadcast on TV so I want to show you fotos from one of its scenes wherein a family (you guessed it) mass-murdered at their dinner table. Here’s the roast they were about to dig into before their situation became so very grave:

Yummy...

And below, here’s the roast as it was when the bodies were discovered, weeks later - caked with blood and face-down in the soup. Faking furry mold on this dish was the most fun I’ve ever had styling a rib roast with tile grout and spray glue.

Not yummy

Now, back to “Coquille”.

During the production meeting, I get a clues of the gruesome images that our talented special effects crew will create for this episode as director Guillermo Navarro selects “heros” from the items Michael Genereaux, our property master, has assembled: gutting knives, guns, guy wires. All the props are carefully chosen to flesh out the personality of the characters who use them. Maybe you are what you eat but you are also what you wear, drive and wield…as well as that cheesy motel you stayed in last night.

“What about the severed testicles?’ asks Guillermo, scanning the display for a prop required in Scene 16.

“Oh we can ask my wife,” deadpans Michael, “She keeps mine in her purse.”

My sketches of possible food presentations for plates and platters

The opening scene finds Hannibal and Co. enjoying a meal in the serenity of the cannibal’s elegant dining room. A quiet moment savored slowly – sustenance before our plunge into this week’s murderous rampage: there’s madman (what, only one?) out there making angels out of men.

At Hannibal’s table, Jack’s wife, Bella refuses her plate of foie gras. She’s offended by the animal cruelty that produces the fatty liver. Well then, Bella how about a little slice of Foie de Jeune Fille which is more likely what Hannibal is serving...

Faux foie for two

Jack and Bella – Lawrence Fishburne and Gina Torres also married in real life, prefer not to eat real foie gras. I find this out after I have begged, pleaded and cajoled my supplier, Keir into hand-delivering enough Quebec-grown duck liver in time for me to prepare it for the shoot. (Let’s see: 2 3/8 pages of dialogue with 3 people would be about 4 takes per character plus establishing, cover shots = about 15 takes x 3 plates x 3 slices = 135 slices ÷ 20 pc/lb = 6.5 lb of foie. Food styling is more math than cooking). So on top of the real foie, I now need to make fake foie torchon for their plates. I adapt a tamale recipe for this and steam ahead.

Fresh and dried figs with pomegranates

Foie gras is dizzyingly delicious but it is controversial. Traditionally, geese and ducks have buckets of feed repeatedly crammed down their gullets in order to engorge their livers with silky unctuous fat. This force-feeding is quick but painful, hence the controversy. But foie gras can be produced in the natural way…humanely. Geese naturally gorge in autumn to fatten for the autumn migration and their livers get fatty and engorged – sort of like Jack as he happily gobbles down double portions of the dish.

Brioche to accompany the foie gras

OK, gather around the stove -- it's TV Dinner time: here are your recipes for this week's Cookin' with the Cannibal!

Seared Foie Gras with Plum Basil Sauce

This is a quick version of the appetizer Hannibal serves Jack and Bella. Searing foie is a much easier prep than toiling over a torchon. Hannibal serves a Fig Vidal sauce; the recipe here is Sage Plum Berry.

Serves 4 generous appetizer portions

½ lobe duck foie gras (about ½ lb)

¼ cup flour

to taste sea salt, freshly ground black pepper

½ tsp butter

optional balsamic vinegar glacé

1. Remove foie from refrigerator and let stand 30 minutes or just until pliable. Using the tip of a knife, carefully cut out veins and discard, keeping liver intact. Cut in ½-inch slices. Dredge in flour and sprinkle lightly with salt and pepper. Refrigerate until ready to sear and serve.

2. Ten minutes before serving, heat sauté pan over high heat. Add butter and, just as butter browns, add 5 or 6 slices of foie to the pan – do not crowd them. Sear quickly, just til browned on both sides. The slices will release some fat but should still be rare in the middle. Repeat with remaining slices.

3. Drizzle with reduced balsamic glacé. Serve immediately with Sage Plum Berry Sauce and toasted brioche.

Sage Plum Berry Sauce

1 cup fruity red wine

½ cup cranberry sauce

1 Tbsp red wine vinegar

3 prune plums pitted and cut in quarters

2 red plums pitted and cut in sixths

1 cup blueberries

2 sprigs fresh sage

½ tsp orange zest

1. In a small saucepan, reduce wine over high heat to half-volume. Stir in cramberry sauce and vinegar. Add plum chunks, blueberries, sage and orange zest. Reduce heat to low and simmer until plums are softened but not mushy.

2. Serve cool if with seared foie gras or warm if with torchon slices.

Foie Gras en Torchon

This takes time and effort but the smooth texture is really worth it. Don't overcook it or you will be left with a sad tiny piece of liver and a big pool of duck fat. If you have a sous vide cooker, this is the time to bring it out.

½ lobe duck foie gras (about ½ lb)

1 cup Madeira, port or brandy

1. Marinate liver in Madeira in a zip-lock plastic bag overnight. Remove liver and pat dry. Allow to soften at room temperature for about 30 minutes. Remove veins with the tip of sharp knife. Keep the liver intact. Using a clean linen towel, (that’s the “torchon” part – French for towel) roll the liver, using the towel to press it into a cylinder shape about 2 inches in diameter. Pull away the towel and wrap the liver in plastic wrap, rolling it tightly in 4 or 5 layers. Twist the ends closed and tie tightly with kitchen string. Wrap again with a few more layers of plastic wrap to seal the liver in a watertight casing.

2. Over high heat, bring water to boil in a pot large enough to contain the liver roll. Reduce heat to maintain a water temperature of 130°. Put liver roll in water and poach for 20 minutes. Remove and refrigerate at least 4 hours until firm. Peel off plastic wrap and cut liver in ½-inch slices. Sprinkle with sea salt and drizzle with balsamc glacé. Serve cold with warm Sage Plum Berry Sauce and brioche toast.

Lamb Fries

Because someone is careless and loses his testicles in Scene 16.

And because you may only have one pair of testicles but you can't have too many testicle recipes.

Tenderly chewy in texture and tasting like lamb-ish sweetbreads, these are deep-fried and actually, pretty tasty. (Well, no big surprise -- anything deep-fried is delicious. Especially with a side of French-fried potatoes and – might as well do some while the oil is hot – onion rings.) Confession: I didn’t have time to test this recipe (will edit this post when I do) – so I’m not sure of quantities but you can use this recipe as a guideline. As is often the case in life, the size of your testicles will determine in part how it all pans out.

I pair lamb’s testicles

2 Tbsp flour for dredging

1 egg yolk with water added to yield ½ cup

¾ cup Panko Japanese breadcrumbs or other soft breadcrumb

¼ tsp salt

lemon wedges

oil for deep-frying

1. Heat oil to 375º

2. Cut testicles in ½-inch slices and peel off and discard the thin membrane. Dredge in flour. Several slices at a time, dip slices in yolk mixture, then coat with breadcrumbs. Set aside on cookie sheet until all slices are coated.

3. Deep-fry in batches until golden brown. Drain on paper towels. Serve with lemon wedges.

Bone appetit!

The bleating lamb’s

chatty tongue

now silenced.

Lie still.

Cat caught you.

And you are

Still lying?

Is there a doctor in the house who isn’t a psychopathic killer monster??? Get me out of this episode, nurse! As Hannibal’s food stylist, I’m looking furtively for food scenes, scanning the script with my hand over my eyes because every line I read is a horrific scene I’ve revisited. Five times.

That’s because we are in the Goldenrod revision – that means the script has been changed five times. Back in the paper script days, each revision would be issued on different colored looseleaf paper (consecutively: blue, pink, yellow, green, then goldenrod and on and on until you were in double goldenrod hell) We would clip these new colored pages into our first draft white copy to keep our script updated. Now it’s all paperless but the revisions are still named by the old colors. Except there are no colors…cuz there’s no paper. Gone like the hands of time.

Menu planning has its ups and downs

In four days the food has gone from this:

Initial concept sketch: Tongue Baked in Salt served in the Dining Room with Blood Red Summer Pudding for dessert

...through a couple of rewrites to this:

Final plate design: Tongue en Papillote with Duxelle Sauce

“Nice to have an old friend for dinner”, says Hannibal at the top of the dining room scene as he presents plates of Lamb Tongues en Papillote to Dr Chilton and Alana Bloom. So, let me see: 3 people times 5 pages of dialogue minus 3 pages of flashbacks times 2 tongues per plate. Ummmm. That’s 72 tongues equals 24 tongues each. I don’t think any of the actors want to eat even the tip of 24 tiny tongues. Especially not the tip.

Is Raul Esparza a vegetarian? Does Caroline Dhavernas hate lamb? These are the actors doing the scene with Mikkelsen. My queries to the producer disappear into the black hole of unanswered emails.

I think about this as I watch my test batch of lamb’s tongues poach. They curl up into grayish-mauve lobes of what look like blind oversized larvae. They are not tempting.

No matter how ghoulish, I want the food to look like something you really want to taste –against your better judgment. Every character in this show is on a knife-edge. Will teeters on the edge of sanity; Hannibal balances between truth and lies; Jack is cold, then kind. I want the food also to have the tension of precarious balance: repellant but tempting. Slightly off-center.

The Caesar salad watches with peacock eyes as I deconstruct it on the props table

Prepping for the dinner scene, I hand-shape the tongues individually out of a modified Kibbeh recipe – bulgar ground with beef stock and mild spices. I make them bigger than lamb tongues because I want them to look like children’s tongues – out of the mouth of babes. (FBI babes?) Then I steam them and shade them with food coloring. I make 60 which luckily, turns out to be exactly the right amount. If the director had asked for one more take I would have been in trouble. Sometimes you get lucky…

A succulent pair of tongues in an origami lotus

Sometimes you don’t…

Wine Jelly - no problem. Sugared Roses - no problem. Norton grapes - PROBLEM!!!!!

Toto, we are not in Norton country

Two days before the shoot, another script change that has Hannibal garnishing wine jelly with Norton grapes.

I call Chrysalis, the largest grower of Norton grapes in the US. Could they Fed-Ex us some? Sorry, they just shipped out the last of their Nortons but they would phone around to some of the small producers.

I call my brother-in-law who studied to be a vintner in Australia. Yes, says Adam, they are in the opposite season Down Under but the grapes are still green.

I call John Szabo, the Master Sommelier who contributed wine notes to my Cocktail Chef cookbook. Nothing local that resembles Norton. Can’t I use another large round table grape? No, I say the script calls for Hannibal to peel a Norton grapes to show the flesh is the same color as the skin. All the available grapes have pale green flesh.

I call Jojo a crime reporter pal of mine who knows a lot of local wine-makers. OK, I’ve scraped the bottom of my wine-pal barrel.

Chrysalis calls back empty-handed. I knew that.

I go – as we all ultimately must, to Google. The Great One links me effortlessly to Dr. Violetka Colova of the Centre for Viticulture and Small Fruit Research at the Florida University. She is the world’s leading authority on Norton grapes. She is charming, sympathetic and full of ideas and eye-opening information but has not one single Norton grape in her vast research greenhouse.

Only one day left to solve this. I buy a couple flats of large round red grapes and start testing materials: wax, shellac, latex. In the end, I peel the grapes, dye them in purple food coloring, then dip them in some thinned purple pigmented beeswax that I had left over from an encaustic art project. Once the wax hardens, I dust the grapes with white eyeshadow to give them a just-picked bloom. By 10pm, my entire kitchen is decked with little purple balls dying and drying on wire racks. In the middle of my grape-elf work, I get a call from the director: could I bring a couple of grape alternatives. Oh, hey, no problem. I rethink my shellac idea and try painting some of the grapes with nail polish. The results are not bad at all. My call time is in 5 hours.

I wake up in 3 hours to phone my assistant, Ettie: On the way to the shoot, please stop at the 24-hour drugstore and pick up an assortment of dark nail polish. We rush to the studio and paint up a batch of alternative grapes. They dry just in time for the director to say he prefers the wax ones. Well, that worked out well.

A breadbasket I fashioned from a leaf and a horn gets kicked to the curb (too big for the shot) - in the background are several trays of little tongues waiting to go on camera.

As I write this, I’m trying not to worry about the champagne towers I built yesterday for a party scene in “Dr. Cabbie”, a film about a cab driver who becomes famous for delivering babies in his taxi. They are shooting the scene now and I’m not on set to coach the actor as he pours the champagne in that top glass -- camera rolling as the champagne floods over, filling the pyramid of glasses – or not. I hope the props guy is saying, “Well that worked out well.”

Now, to get to the meat of the matter, the recipe for this week’s episode:

Silver Tongue Devils

An easy version of Hannibal's Lambs' Tongues en Papillote with Duxelle Sauce
Serves 4 small portions

It’s a little tricky to get lamb tongues so I’m giving you a recipe using cooked beef tongue which you can buy by the pound at a deli (or brine and poach a fresh one yourself.) For Hannibal, I folded origami lotuses out of parchment paper to present the tongues but here, I’ll give directions for folding simple foil packets to bake the tongue in. Elegant packets can be made “en Papillote” out of heart-shaped paper if you know the technique and have the parchment, but this foil version is dead simple.

For the Duxelles

½ cup chopped red onions

2 cups chopped mushrooms

3 Tbsp butter

¾ cup white wine

pinch nutmeg

to taste salt and pepper

¼ tsp balsamic vinegar

For the Tongue packets

4 sheets light aluminum foil cut in 12” diameter circles

12 oz cooked tongue, sliced ¼” thick cut in pieces 3” x 2”

1 tomato, cut in ½” dice

4 sprigs fresh rosemary

olive oil

Make the Duxelles: In a very large sauté pan over medium high heat, melt butter and add onions, frying til they begin to soften. Add the chopped mushrooms and saute, stirring frequently, just until mushrooms release their juices.
Add wine and boil until liquid is reduced to 2 or 3 Tbsp. Season with nutmeg, salt and pepper and balsamic. Set aside to cool.
To make the packets, place a circle of foil on working surface. In the centre of the lower half of the circle of foil, place 1 slice of tongue, top with 1 Tbsp Duxelle, another slice of tongue and more Duxelle. Add another layer if your tongue slices are small. To close up the packet, bring the upper half of the circle of foil over so the upper and lower circumferences meet. Crimp the edges together well, making the seal as airtight as possible and taking care to leave at least one inch of space all around the tongue. This is where the aromatic steam will build up during the baking, puffing out your foil packets. Repeat with remaining foil sheets. Refrigerate until 30 minutes before serving. Reserve remaining Duxelles to serve on the side.
Twenty minutes before serving time, place the foil packets on a baking sheet and bake in a pre-heated oven at 350° for 15 minutes. Reheat Duxelles. Plate the foil packets unopened. When guests open their packets at the table, a lovely puff of rosemary-scented steam will rise to whet their appetites.

For the shoot, the vegetable accompaniment was steamed squash – to give the actors something to eat other than the bulgar tongues.

Next week: Heart Tartare and Jose Andre’s Tomato Brains

Meat meet.

Eight ate.

Plasma, hearts, spleen:

A deep red ribbon

Whirring in his blender.

Extruding from his grinder.

Laid upon his table

Mesmerizing guests.

That bad Hannibal! He really knows how to keep a food stylist running. Now he’s having a whole bunch of friends for dinner – and that’s not counting the guests.

In the production meeting, we discuss the massive food scenes: Freezing Frenzy - Hannibal stashing his ill-gotten groceries in his Sub-Zero mini-morgue; Frying Frenzy - Hannibal cooking for a huge party: Feeding Frenzy - Hannibal presenting a lavish dinner for eight. The organ tally is mounting. I'll need organs going into the freezer, out of the freezer, onto the chopping block, through the grinder, into the ovens and onto the dinner table. More meat every way all day.

Layout of platters proposed for the dining room table

At the abattoir, my boxes of carefully culled “hero” organs are ready. Also, a pail of pig’s blood which I need for a scene where Hannibal separates blood in a centrifuge so he can use the clear plasma in a tomato broth. My guy at the plant tells me pig’s blood is not used for food much these days, but it’s more in demand by non-food industries. His company ships barrels of it all over the world to make iron supplements. Then he tells me something I can hardly believe: many slaughterhouses sell their blood to cigarette companies to put into the filters. Something about the high protein binding qualities of hemoglobin make it excellent at trapping toxins, keeping the poisons from getting into smokers’ lungs. I shake my head. Why not just eat bacon? Smoky and delicious.

Every head cheese should have a cucumber tiara studded with radishes - in the foreground, wild boar pate and king and shiitake mushrooms

I just get my offal beauties vacuum-pack for the freezer insert shots when I find out - of course, there is a last-minute change in the shooting schedule. We are shooting the dinner scene in two days! I need more organs!!!! There’s no time to requisition them from the abbatoir. I have go to the ethnic butchers and work with what’s on the racks.

I stop in at the Italian butcher who has gut, heart and liver but is horrified by my request for lung and spleen and rushes me out of his shop like I’m Rosemary’s Baby’s godmother or something. My humiliation is complete in Chinatown, where I ask for lungs, heart and liver in mangled Cantonese. “Gee yeoh…gee whang lei…gee sie,” I sing-song which sends the men at the meat counter into spasms of laughter. They are killing themselves guffawing and gasping for air as I pound my chest like Celine Dione trying to communicate “lung”. They supply me with some of the body parts on my list and I move on, hoping to find more and better specimens elsewhere. Thank goodness for the Sino-East-West Indian shops out in the suburbs where they display everything in rows of styro trays.

Heart Tartare in vol-au-vents - a great suggestion by Robyn Stern from Jose Andres ThinkFoodGroup

Shoot day is a killer with nine food scenes. One of my assistants, Kristen Eppich, goes on-camera as a cook’s helper in the big kitchen scene. My 1st assistant, Ettie Benjamin and I stay in the trenches and handle the food prep. Our prep tables are covered in bloodied cutting boards, wads of plastic wrap, mixing bowls and pots and pans. Emerging from this mass -- a headcheese the size of a volleyball wearing a cucumber tiara, platters of galantine, liver en gelée, blood sausages, carpaccio, sopressatta and wild boar pate. Not a leafy green in sight. The director wants a meat-only dinner. And you and I and millions of viewers know what kind of meat. There are only eight people in the world who don’t - and they are applauding Hannibal as the credits roll.

The dinner scene: A hand (and a leg and a lung) for Dr Lecter photo: Brooke Palmer/NBC

I had to pvr Hannibal this week so I could throw octopus at the tv while I watched the Stanley Cup Playoffs. (I just happened to have about 20 lbs of octopus on hand for a scene I’m prepping for Dr Cabbie, the movie I’m working on right now.) So I will view it on the weekend. This gives me time to whip up a tray of canapés to snack on while I watch it with friends. Here are a couple of recipes adapted from Hannibal’s dinner so you can do the same:

Brain and Tartare Canapés

Here are two fillings for puff pastry tartlets. You will need 24 mini pastry shells which you can buy ready-to-use or frozen and ready-to-bake. If neither are available, buy blocks of frozen puff pastry and prepare as described below.

Tomato Brain Barquettes

Tomato Brains are the discovery of Jose Andrés, our brilliant culinary advisor. They are a lesson in seeing the unusual in the ordinary. If you gently tear away the flesh from a tomato, you will reveal the seed jelly clusters which shimmer within every tomato like handfuls of ruby cabochons – or the brains of tiny Martians, depending on how your mind works. He suggested stuffing them in pastry shells for our grand banquet. I’ve added a schmeer of tapenade to add a bit of zing.

12 barquettes or tartlet shells

3 to 4 large ripe plum tomatoes

2 Tbsp prepared tapenade or chopped Nicoise or Kalamata olive

freshly ground pepper and sea salt

chervil, parsley or chive

1. Cut off the top ½ inch of the stem end of a tomato. Leaving the seed jelly clusters intact, gently tear away the tomato flesh to reveal a wedge-shaped cluster of seeds. Slide the tip of a sharp paring knife under the seed cluster to release it from the core of the tomato. Carefully set aside on a plate. Repeat until you have 12 to 16 clusters.

2. Spread 1/2 tsp of tapenade in the bottom of 12 of the prepared pastry shells, Slide one or two tomato brains in to shell. Season with salt and pepper. Garnish with a leaf of chervil, parsley or lengths of chive.

Lobotomizing tomatoes for your pastry shells

Beef Tartare Tarts

For the Dinner For Eight, Hannibal served Heart Tartare. The recipe here is for Beef Tartare although if you want to add more flavor, texture and frisson to your canapé tray, instead of beef, substitute fresh veal heart, trimmed of fat and tendons and chopped very finely. For the half-hearted, use a mixture of ground sirloin and minced heart.

12 barquettes or tartlet shells

4 Tbsp good quality olive oil

1 Tbsp finely diced cornichon pickle

1 Tbsp Dijon mustard

1/2 tsp Worcestershire sauce

8 oz beef sirloin, ground OR heart, very finely minced

4 Tbsp minced shallots

1 tsp orange zest

freshly ground pepper and sea salt

capers

truffle oil (optional)

1. In a large mxing bowl, combine olive oil, pickle, mustard and Worcestershire. Add beef, shallots and zest. Season to taste with pepper and salt. Set aside in fridge until ready to serve.

2. Just before serving, fill 12 pastry shells with beef mixture. Mound remaining mixture in the centre of serving dish and surround with filled tarts. Drizzle with truffle oil and garnish generously with capers.

To make 24 Pastry Shells:

1 – 14 oz pkg frozen puff pastry

¼ cup melted butter, optional

1. Thaw dough according to instructions. Pre-heat oven to 400°. On floured board, roll half of the dough to 1/8-inch thickness into a rectangle that is about 9 x 7 inches . Press into small barquette tins or shape shells as follows: Cut dough into rounds using a 2-inch cookie cutter. Using a 1-inch round cutter, press an impression in the middle of each 2-inch round. The impression should be as deep as possible without cutting through the dough. Prick inside round with fork tines. Repeat with remaining dough.

2. Place rounds on baking sheet. Bake for 12 to 15 minutes or until golden brown. Set aside to cool as you prepare fillings below.

3. Prepare the rounds for filling by pulling out a few layers of the center round from each, leaving a 1/4-inch wall around the outer circumference of each shell, thus forming a well for the fillings.

4. Brush shells with butter for flavor, if desired.

Post Script

A lot of you have been asking about the High Life Eggs from the Episode Formerly-Known-As-4 which was pulled from broadcast and only available on line. I’ll post the recipe and details in a couple of days.

Also, details about a Hannibal Dinner that is being held at a pop-up June 18.

Next week: Girlfriend Sausage in Saffron Rice

Bittersweet

Cello suite

Rosin raising cries:

Gutwrenching.

He strings you along

Then plays

you like

a violence.

When you are the food stylist on a show about a cannibal, and the props buyer asks for buckets of sausage casing, you know it’s not for packing wieners for a picnic. Something really awful is going to happen.

By the time I get the script, I already know it’s going to be grisly but nothing in my little life has prepared me for the opening scene. Not happy just impaling nurses with IV hangers, or sticking girls on staghorns, our dear writers are making people into instruments out of split larynx and spilled gut.

Seed pods spilling their guts of olive and peppers

With this visual in mind, who can cook? I sink into my sofa and a memory rises: my brothers and I happily making a drum out of a rabbit skin and a #10 tin can while, beside us in the kitchen, our father cooked the little ex-hopper into a fricassee. There’s a fine line between the hungry and the heinous. We shudder at the sight of a flayed beast but salivate when we smell a roast. From vegan to carnivore the boundaries seem fuzzy. But not so cannibalism. It is a thing so taboo that, in many countries there doesn’t even have to be a law against it.

Why does Hannibal eat people? In a show that is all about empathy, there is no degree of empathy that can help us understand that.

Found these little candied crab snacks in Chinatown but they were too tiny for my Paella

Speaking from the deep of Hannibal’s mind, Bryan Fuller, our incredibly brilliant show writer/creator says “Eat the Rude.” Of course, Hannibal hates rudeness. I, the food stylist speaking from the deep of my stomach say “Cook the Rude.” After all, the essence of cooking is refinement. It is civilization by ritualization. By sliding scale as Levi-Strauss says in The Raw and the Cooked.

Vegetarian blood sausages with fffffava beans from Ceof Episode (on line)

I guess Hannibal – who could have been such a nice boy if he hadn’t slid into darkness, cooks unruly people to make them better and worthy of his respect. With his batterie de cuisine, he cuts, beats, whips, tosses, binds and grinds them into fine pate or a delicate curry. Then feeds them to each other just for fun. We know he really likes Will. And Alana because Will does. And Bedelia too. But does he like them the way I like duck? With a nice chianti?

So judgy. he needs to lighten up.

So thinking of Hannibal’s subtlety and of his deceptive nature, I decide not to make a lot of the gut theme in the script. A big pile of sausages or chitlin stew would be too obvious.

Crab stuffed with Sausage pilau

I choose crab. Because crabs walk sideways. Never straight. With those big pincer claws always raised and ready to pin you in place and rip you to bits. Evasive and easily provoked -- deking to his right as you lunge to his left. So, Hannibal’s dinner scene will feature crab stuffed with saffron rice and – just to show you he does have the guts, a little bit of sausage.

Salted baby squid: Did they eat the mussels or are the mussels eating them?

Put the rice on, Sugar. Time to cook dinner.

Paella on the Rocks

While we are doing this episode, Jose Andres is jet skiing in the Caymans with Anthony Bourdain but he takes the time to email me – paella does not have sausage. So if you make this with sausage, please call it pilau.

This is a recipe from the marginalia of my cookbook, The Cocktail Chef. Paella cooked aire libre. Take your groceries outside into the summer’s evening light and try it. With a lot of sangria.

2 lb clams in shells scrubbed clean

2 lb mussels in shells scrubbed clean

½ lb cooked chicken (or cooked sausages) cut in chunks

4 lg tomatoes, cut in chunks

½ tsp saffron, rubbed

2 cloves garlic, minced

2 cups rice

3 cups stock, wine or water

1. Make the fire’s perimeter out of several large rocks of the same height, or use an iron tripod that can provide level support for your paella pan (or deep sauté pan with a lid).

2. Build a wood fire under the pan.

3. When the flames are licking hotly at the sides of the pan, add oil, garlic, tomatoes, clams and mussels. Throw in that glass of wine you’ve been drinking and cover. Simmer until mussels and clams are just cooked, removing them from the pan with a slotted spoon and transferring them to a mixing bowl as soon as the shells open. Mussels will open first and fast. Clams take longer – be patient. Set cooked seafood aside.

4. To the pan, add the rice and saffron plus enough liquid (water, stock, wine, Bloody Caesar) to equal twice the measure of rice. Allow all to boil gently. If mixture is boiling too rapidly, spread the wood away from the centre of the fire. Boil until the top of the liquid is level with the top of the rice.

5. Scoop out all flaming wood under the pan to lower the temperature, stir rice quickly and cover. Continue cooking until rice is tender (about 20 min). Return seafood to the pan along with cooked chicken or sausage and cover. Cook just until hot.

Two cannibals are having dinner. One says, “I hate my mother-in-law.” The other replies, “So just eat the noodles.”

Next week: Juicy Beef Tenderloin and Lotus Root Salad

Photo courtesy Brooke Palmer NBC

We are planning an exclusive pop-up dinner featuring Hannibal-inspired tasting plates.
Brain Ravioli in Beurre Brun, Blood Sausage Cassoulet, Crispy deep-fried Sheep Intestines on Panisse, Humano (Veal) Tonato, Chocolate-Blood Tarte are just a few of the menu items we're considering.

Chef Max Kantor will helm the venerable Cookbook Store's studio kitchen for the evening. National Post calls him "one of the hottest chefs in town"...a recent doc on his "Secret Pickle Supper Club" describes his social-media dinners as "must-attend events"

More details to come!

Totem.

A tower of powerless

femurs, fibulas and spines.

Red blood on

White snow

Soiled like a bone china plate.

I’m flipping through the Production Draft of 109. There are so many dead bodies in this episode. I need a couple of Will’s aspirins.

The images are macabre: a monstrous totem pole sculpted from the broken decaying bodies of ten victims. Erected as the culmination of a killing spree like a gruesome end-of–festival Burning Man.

Jack is getting colder and Will is getting crazier. I just want Beverly Katz to march into this script right now and solve the whole thing so I can relax and think about dinner.

So I plug “Hannibal’s Dining Room” into the script’s search function and go immediately to the food scene.

The meat of the matter is mid-way through the script. Hannibal is serving a red-blood meat dish to Will, Abigail and that rascally Miss Lounds. But surprise! She is a vegetarian. (Miss Lounds, not Lara Jean Chorostecki who plays her.)

sketch for dinner scene with Freddie, Will and Hannibal

That Freddie Lounds isn’t afraid of anything and though she may have dodged a bullet by ordering salad from Hannibal, I want her leafy greens to be even more menacing than the oozing meat on the Will and Hannibal’s plates.

For the salad, I’ll use white asparagus that will suggest finger bones when I cut the stalks into thumb and finger lengths. Lotus root slices will look like Munch "Scream" faces when juxtaposed with bird skulls.

Skull salad for all

Sketch that up.

Get approvals.

Get bird skulls.

Hmmmm. A bit trickier than I thought – there are so many headless chickens in the shops, shouldn't there be an equal number of disembodied heads somewhere? I ask around and find a woman in a back street of Chinatown who will sell me a big bag of chicken heads. My work here is done, I think. But no, it’s only just beginning. While attempting to boil off the flesh, I realize it is not going to just fall off the bone. This is why every good food stylist needs an able assistant. Ettie, with her usual aplomb and great attitude, patiently cleans the eyeballs, skin and brains off the little craniums, while I reconstruct and bleached them into museum-quality specimens.

Roasted Tenderloin with Pomegranate blood spatter

Hannibal and Will have beef tenderloin. The morning of the shoot, I’ve roasted 8 filets. Of course, I worry that the roasts will be too well-done too look bloody. Or too rare for the actors to eat. On set, as I slice into each roast, I am relieved to find they are all medium-rare. Lucked out again. A little squirt of pomegranate reduction and the beef slices ooze with the “blood” that the director asked for.

Side dish of Anchovies writhing in the Capers

Sadly, madly, the on-set daily (a person who is hired on a film for the day, not for the duration of the series) had chucked the bird skulls into the garbage while cleaning the plates between resets. By the time I discover this, the little bones have been buried in the plate scrapings and we were left with only four – rotating them just adding to the challenge of keeping the reset plates flowing for the multiple takes.

phalanges and skull salad with yellow and candycane beets. Now, where is that bird skull...

A confession.

I don’t have any recipes for you this week. That’s because I am working on this:

Photo courtesy Brooke Palmer NBC

A shameless self-promo:

The venerable Cookbook Store in Toronto's Yorkville is doing a pop-up dinner in their Studio Kitchen inspired by the food I've been creating for Hannibal. It’s going to be a great evening of food and fun.

Brilliant Matt Kantor is the chef for the evening. He’s done pop-ups for elBulli (a 24-course dazzler), Australian pop-ups and the amazing Rush tribute dinner – to name a few.

The menu will feature 7 or 8 tasting plates such as Brain Ravioli with Beurre Brun, Deep-fried Lamb Intestine on Panisse, Flambeed Spleen with Apples, Lamb Tongues en Papillote, Humano (veal) Tonato, Blood Sausage Cassoulet, Chocolate Blood Tarte.

If you’re in Toronto June 18, why not join us!

Wait – I do have a recipe!

For all of you who have been asking for the High Life Eggs recipe.

Thanks to wonderful Robyn Stern, Jose Andre's culinary researcher who sent these photos of the pages of Jose Andre's antique copy of Practicion, the 19th century culinary guide written by Angel Muro. Here is the recipe as it is in Spanish from the original text. I’m experimenting with it next week using duck eggs and will post my findings. In English.

Huevos high-life recipe pg 1

Huevos recipe continued pg 2

from Jose Andres library

Next week: Jamon Iberico and Spanish tapas.

Curing

Conceals

Killing.

Salt in the wound.

He can smell the disease you can not see.

Deadly perfume.

As first light breaks, I approach the windowless warehouse. No one in sight, so I try the door. It swings open to a darkened stillness. I slip inside, eyes straining for light and make my way to the waiting crates.

Then I see it - the silhouette of a severed leg.

I grab it and stiffly swing it around. It topples against me, dry skin and bare bone brushing my arm. But my eyes have adjusted to the darkness and I can see the Apparatus just beyond. With all my might, I push back on the leg and heave its fleshy thigh onto the massive spike at the base of the Apparatus. With what strength I have left, I twist the ankle into Apparatus’ spiked metal cuff. Steady now... turning the bolt, I clamp the leg in place.

I know have the upper hand, now - finding the knife, I raise its curved blade to the beast.

Having a little nightmare? No. Just getting the leg of bone-in Spanish ham into the ham holder stand. My big food scene is first up and I have arrived an hour before call time -- way before any of the crew so the house lights are not on yet. Just a few dim task lights dotted throughout the vast studio in the maze of flats that make up the various sets of Hannibal.

When you purchase a whole Iberico Jamon, the hoof has been removed to comply with import regulations so I did what Hannibal might do if somebody's foot gets sawed off while you are making her leg into a nice ham: I built a fake hoof out of wax, putty and shoe polish and attached it to the cut end of the bone, drape on a nice decorative rope and voila! No one the wiser...

I love the stillness in the sound stage before call time. The calm before everyone arrives. Then, gradually the day begins: first, the house lights come on, the bins and crates start rolling across the floor, Set Dec arrives to put final touches on decor and Props begins laying out and organizing the multitude of carefully chosen items that actors will handle as the day of scenes spools out over the next ten hours. Hair/Makeup and Wardrobe begin to work their magic on the actors whose drivers are dropping them at their trailers one by one. Electrical/lighting crews arrive and start heaving cables and heavy equipment. The activity and noise level rise to a steady hum. Sound, the only silent department. Slowly, the Beast has come to life.

Just about ready to go to camera. Jamon looking like a ballerina - hoof looking like a size 4 Manolo Blahnik

First break of the day...

I’ve set up my food styling station so, looking for a bite of breakfast and a cappuccino, I step outside to the craft truck, a compact mobile kitchen full of munchies run by Craft Service. They are the caterers who provide us with meals, snacks and substantials (bigger than snacks smaller than meals). What would we -- the sad, complaining, sleep-deprived worker bees -- do without their steady stream of food: muffins, potato chips, bananas to break the monotony of waiting for your scene to be shot; cappuccino, juice and diet coke for refreshment on the run; lunch buffet to mark the middle of our day – which often starts in the dark of night. And for the food stylist, Craft Service can be a godsend - a fridge to raid when you need just one more tomato to get through the retakes or a can opener when you forgot to bring one.

First draft food sketch

The food scenes of this episode have gone through a number of changes. The unspecified dinner with Jack has turned into a cozy fireside foodless drink and a two-page beef dinner with Dr Sutcliffe has changed to a three page dinner with ham.

Goldenrod revision script food, revised to add more assorted tapas platters

Hannibal uses the Jamon Iberico Bellota as a conversational metaphor, exposing his dinner guest’s glib attitude toward connoisseurship. Sutcliffe scoffs, Facts have nothing to do with quality - if you say something is superior, it becomes superior. Well, we know that this facile remark is going to make Hannibal stew – or at least par-boil. Connoisseurship is made through the long process of understanding the details - the many small facts that each incrementally distance the superior from the merely OK as inexorably as cream rises to the top. Well, if you are a Hume-ist , not a Rousseau-ian.

And about that superior ham....

“The Jamon Iberico is everything I’ve read about and more.”

Just one line in the revised script had propelled me once more, late into the fray. Several trips to the farmers market, a half-dozen long distance phonecalls, favors from local chefs called in and lots of red herrings until at last I locate someone who can deliver a whole bone-in Jamon Iberico Bellota – in 2 days because that’s when we are shooting. Fermin is the sole importer in North America of the prized Jamon Iberico Bellota de Embutidos Fermin. Serrano is their distributor locally. In partnership with Jose Andres (would it have killed someone to tell me this and saved me a half-day of food sleuthing) they worked for over a decade to get through the USDA and bring this buttery nutty melt-in-your-mouth ham to North America. It is the Rolls Royce of Spanish gastronomy.

Additional tapas to serve with the Jamon: Octopus salad on a bed of salted seaweed

The day before the shoot, Jose had given me a phone tutorial on slicing ham in the manner he invented. Cut the top third, but just the top layer, he urges. But I am too dense to understand, No, leave the fat. Just cut the top part off flat, then the top part-way down. I wish I knew what he was talking about. Send me a picture, I plead, knowing a picture is worth a thousand cellphone minutes. Happily, Mike who delivered my ham has given tutorials on ham slicing and came equipped with a video, a pamphlet and a full kit that included an apron that is, curiously, spit up the middle below the waist. If I were a butcher, this is the area I would most wish protected. But just goes to show, how little I know of these things.

The market price for this whole bone-in ham with a sleek Jose Andres designed ham holder is around $3500. Pretty pricey, but if you’re looking for just a taste of this ham, it sells by the slice – or better, shavings for $20 to $25 for 100 gm. (yes, this is the kind of thing you buy by the gram). But make sure it is real Iberico Jamon Bellota. Sliced off the bone, if possible. A lot of salumerias sell a boneless product so they can slice it super-thin like proscuitto on their electric slicer. Anyway, it’s all delish but if you can, go for the best – if only once.

More tapas: A shrimp boil garnished with purple and green brussel sprouts

Time for you to eat!

But instead of a recipe, this week -- a guide to buying Jamon Iberico Bellota and why you should.

Spanish Ham 101:

Jamon Iberico is made from the Iberico pig, a breed in Spain that descended from wild boars. They are dark grey and have long legs with black hoofs, which is why they are sometimes called Pata Negra. After their first birthday, they are released into fields of ancient oaks to roam free and feast on plump acorns as they ripen and fall to the ground. They enjoy this idyllic life until til the vareador has nudged the last acorn off its branch and the season ends. (This is the guy whose sole job is to wander among the oaks with a long pole and shake the acorns out of the trees for the happy pigs. I know I should put this information in a link but I’m going old-style parentheses for lack of computer skill. And also, a link doesn’t give me an opportunity to say that I just realized that being a vareador is the one job that might be better than Hannibal Food Stylist. Where do I apply?)

The best pigs are born in October because when they are old enough to release to the acorn fields, nuts are just beginning to ripen so these piggies can graze for the full season. Lucky by birth date like hockey players or race horses born in January.

Use a super sharp long thin slicing knife to artfully slice your bone-in ham into thin curly shavings.

Buy the Bellota

The best grade is Bellota which means the pig was able to double its weight in the acorn-grazing phase. This weight allows the pork, once salted, to cure for three years or more. It will have a red cord or label to mark it. The dark pink flesh will have a generous inclusion of dots of cream coloured fat.

The best Bellota is the Jamon, or hind leg. It usually has a red cord twisted behind the hoof to label the quality. You can also get a Paleta, the foreleg, which is smaller and not quite as fatty but is not as costly. I’ve seen them with a dark grey cord.

Cebo, pronounced "Say-bow", not cheap-o

Cebo is another grade of Iberico ham but it is made from pigs that did not double their weight so were only able to cure for two years. Also delish but not sprinkled through with as much melty specks of fat as the Bellota. Less expensive, this ham often is marked by a yellow/green cord or label. I’m not so sure about the colour-coding on cords - there is definitely a status message there but it is as unknowable to me as handkerchiefs in jean pockets.

Serrano for show

Serrano is a lighter, less fatty ham that has been aged for 12 months or less. The flavour is not as complex and not speckled with fat but is quite nice and also comes bone-in so if you want to have a party with an authentic Spanish ham centerpiece for a couple hundred dollars, this is your baby.

Eat it with your fingers with crusty bread, good green olives (bella di cerignola!) and salted smoked almonds. And a bone-dry Manzanilla or Fino sherry, slightly chilled.

Good fat not bad fat

Don’t worry about all that fat – it has crystallized in the years of curing into a fat that is good for you.

Next week: Sheep's entrails! Chewin' on chitlins while Dr Chilton chats.

If you were wondering about how I became a food stylist, something from CNN:

on.cnn.com/11g71Ol

Gut feeling:

Sheepish.

His head on a plate

Magnetic images

Missing.

Dashed home last night to watch the Roti episode broadcast and somehow missed my food scene. It’s like when you’re at the ball game and you’ve been sitting through six innings and no one has come close to home plate so you decide you need a hotdog but by the time you get back, the score has jumped to 4-0 and you missed all the action while you were deciding if gravy goes with spicy fries.

Never mind. The whole episode had been going sideways for me from the very beginning when I first read the production draft script:

INT. HANNIBAL’S HOME – DINING ROOM – NIGHT 1

Hannibal ENTERS carrying GALLINEJAS, corkscrew shaped battered morsels, lovingly displayed on a platter.

Hmmm Gallinejas. Chickens in rubber boots? Small female gondoliers? I just don’t know enough (any, actually) Spanish to go much further in my menu-planning for this episode.

Just ask Chef Google

Good for Google. She always has an answer – or more like two thousand answers – you decide which one is the right one. Scrolling multiple pages tells me that Gallinejas are sheep’s entrails prepared in the Spanish manner -- deep fried and served with with fried potatoes. Well, you lost me at “entrails” but got me back at “deep-fried”. Is there anything on earth that doesn’t taste better deep-fried?

Galenejas

Pasta? It looks like sheep intestines to me.

Chef Google also gives me recipes with cheerful remarks such as

“Be very careful to wash the intestines thoroughly because the contents of the gut can be toxic.”

and

“Preparing Gallenejas is quite labor-intensive but the results, although not to everyone taste, can be very good.”

But I am not discouraged until I read Chef G’s helpful hint, “Don’t be put off by the smell when you are boiling the sheep gut -- a bit of airing-out and your kitchen will smell fresh as before.”

Uncle.

I call my pal at Toro, a great tapas place in Kensington and he offers to make me a big batch for the shoot. I'll just pick them up.

Great. Like a big bucket of Take-out.

I love Take-out. I think it was invented by Chinese-Americans so it is actually my right by heritage and tradition to employ it.

Phoenix nests form a cracked cranium spilling Gallinejas between horns on the platter Hannibal serves to Chilton. Gallinejas are usually served with French fried potatoes, hence Chinese Phoenix nests made of crisp-fried julienne potatoes. And it's Blood Orange season, so perfect for blood spatter on the salad platter.

So I’m set with the Gallinejas. Until I get a call from Jose Andres. We can’t use Gallinejas because it’s a Spanish dish and we did Spanish in the previous episode. Too much Spanish! His intrepid assistant, Robyn Stern emails me her suggestions of unSpanish sheep gut dishes. How about Chitterlings? (No, if this was for Blind Lemon Hannibal, it would be OK, but this is Dr H Lecter. No chitlin circuit for him.) Wugen Chang Wang – Taiwanese Stew of pig intestines and blood? (No, we need to keep the sheep metaphor in the script.) Lamb Fries or Rocky Mountain Oysters? (No. Just say No to balls on a platter.)

Jose suggests a refined dish of intestines in dashi broth with delicately sliced daikon and Bryan Fuller loves it! Done.

Or are we?

Sketch of revised Chitlins for Chilton

No final decisions yet because we can’t shoot the food scene. It will have to be picked up later because Raul Esparza who plays Dr Chilton has to go back to New York to shoot an episode of Law & Order.

By the time the food scene can be rescheduled we’ve moved on and shot all of Episode 11. It’s got a Chinese Herbal Medicine soup. So now, Japanese soup is out. Midnight decisions on what sheep gut dish to make.

Kudal in a banana leaf bowl - a riff on Sri Lankan Lumpries - decorated with a young Protea flower that hasn't developed its hard thistles...yet.

I suggest a nice curry. We haven’t done South Asian food yet and there is a lovely coconutty sheep gut curry called Aatu Kudal Kulambu (or “Kudal” for short). It would be a great opportunity to showcase that wonderful cuisine.

As I prep for the scene, no one on the crew wants to sample my curry, even though I reassure them I have used the pasta pictured at the top of this post which I coloured and snipped to look like sheep intestines.

People, it's not people....it's not even sheep's intestines. Sometimes pasta is just pasta!

Plate of banana leaf bowl of curried "sheep intestine" pasta, rice, pomegranate pani puri, purple sweet potato crisps on a cupped banana leaf decorated with a banana flower.

A platter of baby samosas and bindi bhaji, decorated with ladyfingers, baby eggplant and slivered onions

On set, we were debating the best wine to serve with the Kudal and Mads suggested a frosty glass of Hannibal’s homebrewed People Beer. Perfect!

Cauliflower brains - one rubbed with tumeric and the other tandoori spice garnished with a banana flower

Time to get cooking!

So don’t just sit there watching everyone else eat, cook your own delicious curry noodles!

Panthe Kow Swey

This gently spiced chicken noodle stew is the national dish of Burma and my recipe is from actor Sandra O”Neill, national treasure. Besan (black chick pea flour) is called for in her recipe but it’s optional.

If you want to go Hannibalistic, substitute thin strips of cooked tripe for half of the chicken. Tummylicious!

serves 4

one-half chicken, boned and cut in pieces about 1” x .5” x .5”

2 Tbsp crushed garlic

1 Tbsp grated ginger

1 large onion, finely chopped

¼ tsp chili powder

2 tsp turmeric

¼ tsp salt

¼ cup oil

1 cup coconut milk

½ cup chicken cooking liquid or water with ½ tsp Besan mixed in (or not)

2 cups warm, cooked, drained thick rice noodles or egg noodles

Pre-heat oven to 350°
In a bowl, mix together chicken, garlic, ginger, onion, chili, turmeric, salt and oil. Heat a large heavy pot over high heat. Add chicken mixture and fry, stirring lightly (do not brown). Remove from heat and add enough water to cover meat. Bake uncovered in pre-heated oven for 30 min. Remove chicken from cooking liquid, strain cooking liquid and reserve 3/4 cup, adding water if necessary.
Combine chicken, reserved cooking liquid and coconut milk in a large saucepan and simmer over low heat for 15 minutes. When ready to serve, place a portion of noodles in four large soup bowls, add chicken pieces, spoon liquid over that and serve. Place the small bowls of accompaniments in the centre of the table, encouraging guests to generously sprinkle accompaniments on top of their Kow Swey as they eat it.

Accompaniments:

1 small bowl chopped tomatoes

1 small bowl chopped green onion

1 small bowl chopped coriander leaves

1 small bowl boiled egg, diced

1 small bowl lime wedges

1 small bowl pan-fried dried whole chillies

1 small bowl crisp-fried onion bits

1 small bowl crisp-fried garlic bits

I hope you try this dish. It is easy to make and really really really good.

Next week: Silkie Soup - Chinese Herbal Medicine in a bowl is probably not potent enough to make up for what’s happening to poor Will. Why are the writers so mean to him? Fight back, Will, fight back! You've got to make it through Season 2 now that Hannibal's been renewed....

Consuming consommé:

Restorative rest or rant?

He offers you

Clear broth

with

Cloaked intentions.

Soup

to

Nuts.

A week in the life food styling for Hannibal:

Feb 15 - Preliminary draft, unnumbered

This script has not yet been broken into numbered scenes, so I mindfully ignore that page 35 has a two-page scene with Hannibal serving Abigail a lemony dish of what looks like veal. I’m still wrangling sheep’s gut for the previous episode and haven’t got time to sketch up a veal picatta.

However, while I sleep I dream of veal noisettes mingled with char-grilled lemon halves nestled in leafy lemon boughs woven like a laurel crown on the antlers of a black stag.

I wake up and sketch. Mid-way through the script, Will is hospitalized. Hannibal brings him a steaming Tupperware container of a restorative breakfast.

Feb 16 – Preliminary sketch

Sketch for draft version of the script

Feb 20 - Preliminary Production Draft released

Poor Will is in hospital – Hannibal brings him a Tupperware container of amaranth porridge garnished with cruciferous vegetables, legumes and grains. This does not mean he is too busy to make dinner – a guy’s gotta eat - but now his guest is Bedelia, not Abigail. And although the script is being totally rewritten and the Dining room scene is represented only with sluglines, I’m saddened because I know that now, Hannibal’s going to have to do the dishes himself. Madame duMaurier is not the kind of woman who helps you wash up.

Sketch for draft script

Feb 20- One-Liner issued with only Day One and Day Two bookable

Props master says “get the ball rolling” – meaning the conversations with Jose Andres and OKs from producers. OK on the hospital scene. It will be a Chinese medicinal soup my father used to make. That was decided last night in a volley of late night emails between Bryan Fuller, Robyn Stern and myself. Which is a good thing because it is first up on Day Two. Not so OK on the Dining Room Scene which is nowhere to be seen in the One-Liner – the day-by day shooting schedule.

Chinatown shopping - full of fun surprises

I spend the morning gathering fresh black chickens from Chinatown. I need four and each shop I visit has zero to two. I guess black silkie chicken is not a really big item right now, unlike inverted pig rectums – which are everywhere.

Returning to my kitchen studio, I email Mike, the Props Master. Script asks for steam on the soup I ask him if I should prepare for that or can steam be done in Post. But I already know that post-production special effects are too costly. Not surprisingly, Mike says to give the director real steam options.

Back in the day, we used to blow cigarette smoke through straws onto the dish when we wanted steam. Nice! Smoke drifts up because heat rises. But pesky health nuts have driven cigarettes outdoors and now lighting up on set is unheard of. I can but dream of the series of commercials I once shot for Rothmans cigarettes where daily, the suits brought cartons of their product to the studio and gently encouraged us to chainsmoke throughout the sessions.

Feb 22 - Day Two of Eight

Late at night, I pack up my little car which fails to start. Give my battery a jump-start and cross my fingers. In the morning, it starts like a charm. Thank goodness because my food scene is first up:

Black Silkie Chicken broth with red dates, wolfberries, bok choy, ginseng and white fungus. That plate garnish is a Silkie chicken foot tied with pea shoots.

About that steam...

Food styling photographs with steam is no problem. For stills, you can use any number of toxic chemical combos to great effect. But for steam in an eating scene, I regret to say the usual solution is tampons. (T28s in crew-talk). You camouflage them with food coloring, soak them in water, microwave them just before shooting and stuff them under the food. Voila, steam.

Tampons - nay; pompoms - yea!

trimming pompoms to put in mushrooms for steam effect

But I don’t like the potential for embarrassment or misogynistic snickering. Plus there’s nowhere in a clear broth to hide a honkin’ big tampon.

So I make my own little steam-poms. Fat pompoms made out of several shades of brown cotton wool, soaked in water, stuffed into Chinese black mushroom caps that have had the stems and spore gills scooped out. I give the wooly pompoms little brush-cuts so they resemble the excised spore gills.

Then, just before each take, we microwave them under plastic wrap and float them in the broth.

Wow, did you see that steam billow off the soup!!!!! You didn’t? Really? No? On the cutting room floor, you say? C’est la vie...

Done like Dinner

By Day 4 of 8 it looks like the dinner in scene 26 is out. The dialogue has moved to Bedelia’s home. I can relax for the rest of the week. Except the sheep gut scene for the previous episode still has to be shot, along with some food scenes to reshoot for Episode 6 and the draft script for Episode 12 will be popping up in a few days. Other than that, I’m all resto-relaxo.

Time to stew up a restorative broth!

Here's a recipe for you so you can personally test the efficacy of this tasty broth with wolfberries - a herbal remedy that has been used in China for several millennia to increase virility.

Wolfberries in Tomato-Beef Broth

Wolfberries aka Goji berries is a small dried red berry that can be found in Asian grocery stores and health food stores.

½ lb beef round or sirloin, cut in 1-inch cubes

2 Tbsp butter

1 lg onion, sliced

1 lg can plum tomatoes, crushed.

½ oz dried wolfberries

2 cups water

1 lg carrot, cut in chunks

½ cup fresh green peas

salt, pepper to taste

1. In a heavy pot with lid, heat butter over medium-high heat and add beef cubes, stirring til brown. Add onions and stir til lightly browned. Add tomatoes, wolfberries and water. Bring to boil, then lower heat, cover and simmer for 2 hours or until beef is tender.

2. Add carrots and simmer for 20 minutes. Add peas and simmer for 10 minutes. Season to taste and serve.

Next week: Tete de Veau - Two sneaky shrinks dine on Rolled Head of Girl Veal.

Stag hewn.

The movie screen;

The back of your mind:

Head rolls.

Stark. Raven. Mad.

We are almost at the final wrap. This last episode is nightmarish – not because of anything in the script - it’s because we are also shooting tons of scenes from other episodes. It’s our last chance to pick up scenes and inserts and reshoots needed to edit into the final cut of all episodes.

We’ve been shooting now for 7 months and my level of paranoia has been edging into Will-territory: imagining what trouble that evilmeister Hannibal will cook up now. He seemed like such a nice low-maintenance guy back in Episode 1 when we first started shooting…

But now it’s the last episode. So important to hit this one out right of the park.

Waiting is a mind game

Waiting for the script to come in, my mind goes to the Edge of Foodstyling Darkness. What would the worst thing be? Brain. Raw brain being cut into and cooked. Because, guess what – even Zeller’s brain is about 3x bigger than a cow’s brain and 10x that of sheep or pig. No natural animal substitute will do for the human brain.

I had done a bit of footwork in the brain-faking department last month when I got a call from the Set Decorator of a zombie/vampire series being shot in town. Enrico needed for brains to stock an immense “Brain Shed”. Sort of a zombie’s dream Costco: rows and rows of shelves of brains stored in glass jars in a vast warehouse. It would be shot like one of those Ed Burtynsky photographs except instead of blue-clad factory workers, it would be endless rows of brains in jars. How many brains did they need? Thousands. When did they need them? Next week.

I worked around with the costs on various possibilities til the dollars made everyone come to their senses and the scene was dropped.

And I turned my attentions back to my favorite omnivore.

So I’m checking my email every hour expecting the script supervisor to send me the production draft. There’s a production meeting today but I wasn’t called in. So I’m thinking everybody is on board except me. I feet like when I was four and my whole family got into the station wagon for a weekend drive, accidentally (?) leaving me behind. Luckily for them, I was still sleeping when they dashed back for me. Or I really would have made them pay.

I call the Props Master.

No, there is no food in the current outline draft of the last episode.

Wha…no food???!!!

I am relieved but slightly miffed. Move along, no food scene to see here, m’am. Fine. Well maybe there was so much plot to pack into the last episode to create that all-important end-of-season cliffhanger that there wasn’t enough bandwidth to luxuriate in a Hanibalicious food scene.

But I keep checking the scripts as the revisions keep coming in. A dinner scene after all! Hannibal is dining with Bedelia at her place. And he's bringing Take-out.

Relax, the guy has gotta eat.

Tete de Veau Roulade (Rolled Veal Head) under glass

Then Bryan Fuller emails: Hannibal may be serving veal in a scene with his therapist. Any suggestions for veal recipes and fun veal details?

I suggest: What about the cheek of that veal, Abigail? Bruised -- I mean, braised in sherry and mushrooms...

Jose checks in: Also smoked with dry hay, like a funerary ritual where the dead where burnt. But here hay imparts a unique smokey flavor to the meat and to the room! The smell of death but also the smell of a reborn, you become something else by burning and becoming part of the cycle of life! Veal head! Will be awesome to do that! Paul Bocuse has a great recipe! Whole head on the table, boil! With the broth....amazing!

Robyn, his assistant sends me a recipe "Tête de Veau en Sauce Verte" by Paul Bocuse in French with a Google translation into English. She curses Google Translate but I love it. To me, Google Translate English is like Japanese T-shirt English and it makes me giggle.

Great! I say. The pale skin of the Bocuse preparation of poached boned veal head would look delicate and deadly against the parsley sauce, like a corpse on the cemetery lawn.

my production sketch for Tete de Abigail

Smoke from the hay-smoking is nixed because of the problems it would create in shooting. Problems in shooting? This never seems to hold anyone back from asking the impossible but I now know where the demarcation of difficulty is No Smoking. Period.

Pulling Tete de Veau out of a hat

I turn my attention to putting together the Tete de Veau while I’m still working on food for Episode 12. In Paris, every other shop carries Tete de Veau and you can pop in and buy a couple slices on a whim. But this ain’t Paris, Toto. Now, with limited time, do I really want a knife fight with a whole veal head? Pig head, maybe. Cow head, not so much.

I make a call to Mike, the pate guy at Sanagan’s down in Kensington. He has cheerfully saved me before by providing an emergency Head Cheese within 24 hours so I’m hoping he can make me another miracle with Tete de Veau. I explain the size and shape and the next day, what should appear but 2.5 kilos of rolled poached “Tete de Veau” mocked up from a giant pork belly he luckily had in the cooler.

A slice o' Tete with parsley sauce, quail eggs, gerkin slices, capers, red potatoes, red onions, thyme and salt

The shoot is the usual complication of shooting on location. I set up my kitchen in the laundry room of the rambling suburban home they have rented and redecorated as Bedelia duMaurier’s home office. I try not to get lost as I run back and forth within the warren walls created in corrugated cardboard sheeting (put up all over the house to protect the walls and woodwork from us film cretins) up and down the stairs from the set, to my basement prep area, to my car, to the craft table, and around and around in a circular house a million miles away from anything familiar.

But we get the shot.

I have a debate with the director about whether or not to have a skull on the platter of Tete de Veau. I think it needs the skull to indicate that the bud vases are actually bones. And I like the head/skull relationship. And also because I think Hannibal and Bedelia have this kind of pissing match about who’s cooler and who’s scarier. The director says the skull is out so it’s out. He’s OK with the lengths of thigh bones though so I email continuity photos to Fuller and we shoot the thing fairly smoothly in spite of the added difficulty of running the resets up and down the stairs and the obstacle course of cables, crew and carts between my prep area and the set.

Tray of Tete - Skull relegated to the back supply bin

Four hours later, we have the shot. I pack up my stuff and load out of the location. Out of the drizzling cold and into the car. Then back to my studio to curry the pasta for tomorrow. Chiltern will be coming in so we will be back at the sound stage to shoot the curried guts for Episode 11.

There are lots of little pickup shots and insert shots to do over the next few weeks before final wrap. But Laila, one of the regular dailies, is going to handle them. I teach her how to say Pig Lung and Pig Spleen in Cantonese. And let go.

At last - an end to the madness.

Wrap is a mixed blessing. It’s great to finally be able to sleep but it’s sad to say goodbye to the assortment of idiosyncratic people you have worked with day and (mostly) night toiling together over something that may go unseen or unappreciated or most certainly misunderstood.

But thanks to overwhelming response from all you wonderful Fannibals, foodies and friends, my work -- our work has not only been seen, but appreciated well, and understood.

Thanks to you, Hannibal got renewed and production on Season Two starts this August.

We will all be back for seconds!

Thank you.

Next Week: Pictures and recipes from our Hannibal Pop-up Dinner: wish you had been there!

and

To come: at long last...the lowdown on the High Life Eggs!

Terror paused,

Blood staunched,

Hannibal's gone.

A hangover.

The cure?

Hair of the Dog:

A Fannibal foodie feast!

What shall we do with our Thursday habit for fear and feasting now that Hannibal's final episode has aired? Well of course, we do what we always do in a crisis -- go to the fridge for something to eat.

Bone-in Iberico Jamon in front of the vegetarian cookbook section

We did more than that last week at our Hannibal Pop-up Dinner. Hosted by Allison Fryer atThe Cookbook Store, we wined and dined on Lector's delectables -- a dinner of small plates prepared by Chef Matt Kantor and inspired by my season of feeding Hannibal.

Gathered at The Cookbook Store in Toronto's Yorkville

Take an equal measure of Foodies and Fannibals, toss in a talented chef and Hannibal’s food stylist. Stir them together within the book-lined walls of a venerable old book store and what do you get?

An evening to dismember remember.

I decorated the tables with runners of film strips, feathers, roses and candlesticks made from marrow bones.

The meal was made up of Jamon Iberico followed by seven small plates: Blood Sausage with Saffron Butter Beans; Spleen with Bacon, Red Onions and Sage; Lung a la basquase; Brain Cannelloni with Chanterelle Mushrooms; Loin with Tuna Sauce, Tongue en Papillote; and Blood and Cocoa Pudding with Chantilly Cream. (Event photos by Brilynn Fergusen.)

Blood sausage with saffron butter beans

Lamb's tongue en papillote with tomato and mushroom

Brain cannelloni with chanerelles

Chef Max Kantor thrilled us with a continuous stream of small plates that were designed with Hannibal’s offal habits in mind.

Chef Matt and his crew cookin' at The Cookbook Store kitchen

As we feasted on everything from spleen to lung and brain and blood, matching wines flowed: Spice Route Chakalaka 2009, South Africa; Ravenswood Old Vine Zinfandel 2010, California;
Hermanos de Domingo Molina tTorrontes 2011, Argentina; Studet-Prum Graacher Himmelreich Reisling Kabinett 2011, Germany

Veal Loin in Tuna sauce (Serf and Surf)

A veal dish, Loin with Tuna Sauce, was included to represent a young girl’s thigh. As William Seabrooke’s readers discovered from his 1931 book on cannibals, “Jungle Ways”, human flesh tastes most like veal. He learned this not by dining with his African tribe, but by spit-roasting a morsel of man when he got back to Paris. He obtained it from a friend who was studying medicine at the Sorbonne and was able to purloin a chunk from a recently deceased but otherwise healthy patient.

Hmmm. Pretty sure I wouldn’t go that far for truth in writing. I justify vast quantities of what I eat as research but usually it falls more in the killer dessert category rather than the dead patient group.

Tweeting Blood Pudding

Stirred not shaken

Everyone at the Pop-up dinner had a great time. The thrilling food, the enthusiastic guests, the wonderful music. No one wanted to leave. It was a magical evening under the spell of Hannibal. Or maybe it was that cocktail.

Chesapeake Ripper

Inspired – or haunted- by the mushroom men from Episode 4, John Kruusi from the Cookbook Store designed a great cocktail he dubbed “The Chesapeake Ripper”.

Here’s John's recipe:

The Chesapeake Ripper

Scotch and lemon-thyme cherries:

1/4 cup granulated sugar

1/4 cup cold water

A few sprigs of lemon-thyme or regular thyme

1/2 cup scotch

1/2 cup good quality dried cherries (If you can, try to find ones without any additives or preservatives. If not, rinse the dried cherries under cold water in an attempt to remove any oils that may be clinging to them)

Combine the sugar, water and thyme in a small pot and bring to a boil. Remove from the heat and add the scotch and cherries. Cover cherries and leave to plump for approximately 30 minutes. Once plumped, pack the cherries into a resealable jar and refrigerate until ready to use. This also works well with other spirits such as bourbon or rye.

Shiitake infused scotch:

15g dried shiitake mushrooms

1 cup blended scotch

In a clean jar add mushrooms and pour over scotch. Cover and leave to infuse for 1 hour. Strain mushrooms through a fine-mesh sieve or cheesecloth, to ensure all mushroom particles are removed. These proportions can be easily multiplied for larger batches. I used Compass Box Great King Street Artist’s Blend Scotch because of it’s reputation for working well in cocktails. It plays well with other ingredients and is less expensive than a single malt.

To make The Chesapeake Ripper:

2 ounces shiitake infused scotch

1/2 ounce Gonzalez Byass Nectar Pedro Ximénez Dulce Sherry

3 dashes Fee Brother’s Black Walnut Bitters

2 dashes Regan's Orange Bitters No. 6

scotch infused cherries for garnish (skewered on a thyme sprig, if you like)

In a cocktail shaker filled with ice add the scotch, sherry, and both bitters. Stir to mix and strain into a small tumbler over ice. Garnish with the cherries.

You'd better not drink that on an empty stomach...

Now that you have slaked your thirst with a smart cocktail, you can satisfy your summer-between-seasons hunger for Hannibal by watching all those missed episodes you PVRed. Or by reading along with the Red Dragon reading group which will start on Tumblr in July. In any case, you will definitely need nibbles.

Here is a recipe from our Hannibal Pop-up Dinner. And, yes -- it's spleen. You know you want to try it.

My favorite plate of the evening - Spleen.

Rolled Spleen

This recipe is based on Fergus Henderson’s famous dish that he served at his London restaurant St John. If you get your spleen from a natural butcher, you might have to remove the outer membrane which peels off easily. Asian markets usually sell them with the outer membrane removed. The very thin skin of the spleen and the fat that runs its length do not have to be removed. The taste is like mild liver and the texture is like tender kidney. Really delish. I bought 4 spleens, rolled some and made the rest into a rough country terrine that was great spread on toast.

for two or appetizer for eight

2 pork spleens

4 slices of bacon

1 sprig sage

1 cup broth (chicken or vegetable)

salt, pepper to taste

1. Heat oven to 300°F.

( JP working reference shot)

2. On a cutting board, lay a spleen out flat, fat side up. Layer on half of the bacon and place sage leaves along the length. Roll up tightly, jelly-roll fashion and secure with toothpicks. Repeat with remaining spleen.

3. Fit spleen rolls closely together in a small baking casserole. Pour in stock to cover. Cover tightly with lid or foil. Roast for 2 hours. Cool in roasting liquid and drain when cool, remove toothpicks and slice each spleen in four. Serve as a main with boiled buttered baby potatoes and Parsley Salad (below) or as an appetizer with thinly sliced red onions, radishes and cornichons.

Parsley Salad

1 cup chopped parsley leaves (flat)

1 Tbsp capers

! Tbsp chopped red onion

1 Tbsp chopped cornichon pockles

juice half lemon

1 tsp olive oil

salt pepper to taste

Toss ingredients together. This salad is also great with roasted bone marrow.

Next week:At last, the full story on Huevos High Life and a few more recipes from our Pop-up Dinner.

Eggs and mushroom tea.

Break the fast

Break the cup

Shards can hold no poison.

In Quantum, there is no time

The teacup will heal.

Forget the poisoned tea -- everyone's asking for Huevos High Life

Pulled from broadcast, Episode “Oeuf” was viewable only on line. In this episode, Hannibal made psilocybin tea, blood sausages and gorgeous wine-soaked pears but his High Life Eggs breakfast was the most requested recipe of the season. Jose Andre's people sent me these pages from El Practicon, a 19th century book on food written by Angel Muro, and I have modified it into a recipe for you below, translated by my foodie pal Leo and demo'd by my Spanish doctor.

Cooking is one thing...

Food styling is another thing altogether. There's no recipe for that.

You think this episode was deadly for the Kid Killers? Try getting through my day...it's the second day of food scenes and the last day of shooting for this episode. Four of the 5 scenes on today's call sheet have food. Plus one food insert that was scheduled at the last minute.

OK who stole my sides? These are the miniaturized scripts printed on half-sheets that some of us carry around on set. We mean to read them during the lulls so we can get a fresh reminder of the scenes we are about to shoot. But now, of course, most everyone uses their smart phone. I cling to the old paper ways – I like to circle things and make flow charts and diagrams so a print-out works best for me.

But today, of all days, I didn’t get a set of sides. Too busy rushing around organizing my two assistants. We have about a zillion things to prep today because I just found out last night that the CGE people need close-ups in order to do their time-lapse for Will’s flash-back of the mouldy food meal we shot yesterday. So now, we have to re-build the whole meal which the second unit will shoot in the adjacent studio while, in Hannibal's Dining Room set, the main unit shoots the scene where Hannibal and Jack dine on people sausage and ffffava beans. So I am food styling in two places at once.

You just know there are gonna be a few terse words exchanged before this morning is over.

Roll and cut. Roll and cut. Repeat for hours. Then we are into the "Hannibal cooks breakfast" scene.

Our on-set props guy pulls out his sides and asks if I’ve got everything ready for the next scene: Oranges, check. Eggs, check. Sausages, always. Potatoes, check. Brioche. Brioche? He sees the frozen-brain look on my face and reads aloud from the script: (slowly, like I’m three)

Hannibal throws an egg in the air, catches it on the edge of a knife, cracking it and holding it in place as the contents drool onto a slice of brioche with a hole already in a pan, The sausage sizzles and crackles in its own pan, almost done.

Crap.

I forgot to pack the bread for the High Life Eggs. And we are in the middle of a suburban industrial zone. There isn’t going to be a French bakery out here. Bye-bye my brioche.

We still have an hour to prep while the set is being lit for the scene. I send my assistant, Kristen out into the field (literally) to search the suburban supermarkets for challah. (Challah is Jewish brioche. There should be a lot of it on the shelves since it’s Friday – Shabbat when most Jewish families will be putting a loaf on the dinner table. GPS in hand, she roars out of the lot while 2nd assistant, Victoria and I sort through my pharmacopia of dried mushrooms for the scene where Abigail drinks from a poisoned cup.

Thanks to the food styling gods, the scene is held up a bit while Mads and the director discuss an alternative to the samurai egg master trick described in the script. They settle on a potato trick– it’s easier for the set dresser to pick up a slashed potato than it is to wipe smashed raw egg off everything after each take. So now, I have to find a couple dozen identically shaped potatoes and peel them for the knife trick. Because I need another thing to do at this moment.

Brilliant Kristen returns triumphal with 4 dozen challah buns. These will work even better than the challah slices called for in the script. The braided tops are elegantly twisted - like Hannibal himself. A near disaster turns into a brilliant result! We pick out the perfect ones - nine in all - and make them up into Spanish Egg in the Hole.

And we’re rolling!

Your turn to cook now.

Didn't that story make you hungry? Better fry up some Huevos High Life.

My doctor, Rene, is from Spain. His grandmother used to make these all the time. So he volunteered to do this show-and-tell:

Here’s his step-by-step on Huevos High Life. You can see by his photo that a lifetime consuming vats of olive oil has kept him quite slim. So pour it on!

Using a glass or a cookie cutter, cut a round two-thirds of the way into a 1-inch slice of heavy fine-textured bread like Italian or Portuguese white loaf. Pull the bread out of the circle leaving a bit in the bottom. Set aside.

Into a heavy frying pan, pour about 1 inch of olive oil and heat.

Break eggs, each one into its own bowl. Check to see if oil is hot by dropping a small cube of bread in. If it browns within 30 seconds, the oil is ready. Remove the test bread and put the bread slices in the oil.

Yes, that is 1 inch of olive oil. These babies are crispy bits of deep-fried goodness. We didn’t use this much oil for the shoot – Hannibal doesn’t want to fatten you up that much.

As soon as you put the bread in the oil, slide one egg into each hole and continue frying until the egg white sets, sunny-side up. Sprinkle on salt and pepper. The bread might get almost burnt around the edges but this is part of it’s charm – like the charred bits on barbecue or Portugese egg tarts.

Remove and drain on paper towels.

Plate, top with salsa of your choice ( we used chopped tomatoes, avocado, cucumber, peppers) and enjoy! We used duck eggs but chicken eggs are great or you could make minis with quail eggs.

Next time: Recipes for vegetarian cannibals:

Beet Blood Sausages, Mushroom Man Pate, Bones of the Dead cookies

Slice of life

Slice of pie

Sidekick thrust aside.

Beverly.

A cut too deep.

In a kaiseki dinner, Mukozuki is a small side dish of slices of raw and rare seasonal fish – sashimi. It is set on the far side of each guest’s lacquered tray, hence muko zuke (literally “set to the far side”) in a small beautifully glazed bowl or dish.

After going through the script I sketch up these concepts for this episode

Jack mines for the truth as Hannibal collects the gold

Jose Andres, our Culinary Consultant in DC, wants Hannibal to make ‘Hangtown Fry” for this scene – in honor of the San Francisco 49ers. Hangtown Fry is a dish that became synonymous with Californian gold miners striking it rich in1849 and celebrating with the most expensive dish the local saloon-keeper could offer. It was first created by the cook at the El Dorado Hotel in Dry Diggins - renamed “Hangtown” after several unauthorized lynchings (you know how it only takes a few unfortunate outbursts to mar the reputation of a peaceable, if unpolished little town and sully the image of it’s simple but kindly townsfolk).

Hangtown Fry - with a crayfish and smoked Maldons salt

So out come the oversized oysters, sizzling bacon and --- fresh cracked eggs.

We are more than a bit concerned with the Benihana egg trick called for in the script. I’ve tried it and can only get it 1 out of 4 tries, and I’ve seen Benihana chefs flub the manoeuver when they have an entire grill as target. Mads has to crack his eggs into a 8-inch diameter skillet. The props Master calls his guy. The Production Manager calls in his guy. I call my guy. On the morning of the shoot we have 8 dozen eggs and 3 Japanese chefs with their hands made up to be hand doubles.

On set - Three crack egg crackers: Benihana chef, Mads the Juggler and Mark AKA Judge Masa

I guess I don’t have to tell you that when Mads arrives on set, I briefly describe the egg trick to him whereupon he just tosses an egg up in the air and breaks it perfectly on the spatula. Did it. Unbelievable. I insist it was a lucky fluke but he does it again. I accuse him of practicing when I wasn’t looking but he laughs (as if he has time to practise egg-cracking between scenes) and confesses he was a juggler in his youth.

Beverly Kidney Pie

Sad slices of Beverly Pie

Beverly has been in and out of the frying pan so many times in the draft scripts of the last two episodes that I have known for several months I will be cooking her up for Hannibal…yet I am utterly stopped in my tracks when I see vivisected silcone Beverly in the studio, sliced up in clear acrylic like a Damian Hirst cow. I stand 5 inches away from the piece and it looks real. I would like to marvel at the talent of Francois Dageneau, our prosthetic guy who makes these human sculptures, but I can’t. My mind is too busy screaming “She’s really dead!” Not cryovacced a basement somewhere to emerge in a future script. There can be no resurrection from this Slice-o-matic. Beverly Katz is deader than dead.

Beverly Pies line up ready for retakes

I feel something that can only be described as grief. I understand that I will miss seeing the funny talentedHettienne Park in the studio but I am surprised that I feel real sadness about losing this fictional character. I loved her directness – she always solved the crime simply with her clear unwavering logic. While the guys in the room were running around hallucinating, waffling and pouting, she always came up with the goods. I see Hettienne (with baby bump!) in the make-up trailer and tell her I want her to come back in a dream sequence. We can but hope.

Beverly Pate - Yellow and red beets layered with chevre and sliced to show their inner beauty

Buddah's Hand reaching up through the floorboards to grab your leg and pull you into the dirt - which is black quinoa

The kidney in the pie is Beverly’s.

I made Beverly into a pie (honor the Pushing Daisies' Pie Hole!) because no matter how sturdy and delicious the pastry, even though it defines the pie it is just a shell for the meaty centre. The top pastry I made into a mask – in this case, it’s Will’s prison mask. On set, Mads asked me if the pastry was to represent Hannibal's mask – absolutely not! No one wants to keep him out of prison more than I do! Unless he can get a cell with an eat-in galley kitchen.

Making the pastry mask - mini mask shaped in clay, then covered in tinfoil to create a form for baking the pastry tops

I think we will all feel aftershocks from the killing of Beverly – if only because her death is a signal that NO ONE IS SAFE. Let’s all comfort ourselves with a hearty breakfast and two shots of bourbon:

Hangtown Fry

Also great for a light supper or a weekend brunch or to celebrate when you discover gold.

For one serving:

3 eggs

3 Tbsp cream

¼ cup water

3 to 5 raw oysters, shucked

½ cup breadcrumbs

¼ cup flour

6 Tbsp butter

2 thick slices pancetta bacon, fried

salt, pepper

1. In a small mixing bowl, beat eggs and cream together. Remove all but 2 Tbsp to another bowl and set aside while you fry the oysters.

2. In the first bowl, add ¼ cup water to the 2 Tbsp egg mixture and beat together.

3. Spread breadcrumbs on a plate and flour on another plate.

4. Dip each oyster into flour, then egg water, then breadcrumbs to coat evenly.

5. In a skillet over medium-high heat, melt 2 Tbsp of butter and fry oysters just until golden brown. Do not cook all the way through. Set aside.

6. Wipe skillet clean with paper towel and place over medium heat. Add butter. When butter is bubbling, add beaten eggs from 2^ndbowl. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Scramble gently and before egg is completely cooked, add oysters. Continue to scramble gently and when eggs are fully cooked, turn out onto plate. Garnish with bacon slices and enjoy!

Next week: Osso buco was a fore-taste. Can thigh be far behind?

I sent this photo to the Prop Master to show how a veal shank could pass for a food stylist's leg

all material within copyright of Janice Poon unless otherwise noted

Pacing…

Cold cold heart

Heart of stone.

Beats alone.

Pairing…

Cold cold feet

Feet of clay.

Walk away.

Futamono is the mid-meal course in Kaiseki of a small but robust soup or stew served in a lidded bowl. We are mid-meal in the story of Season 2 and now everyone is hiding something in this tempest of tiny pots. One by one, the lids will soon blow off!

Kicking the bucket list

Nothing like surviving strangulation in your swimtrunks to make you lust for life. For you and me, that might mean ordering a dangerously rare steak and staying out late on a weeknight. As always, with Hannibal, it’s an order of magnitude higher: he kicks back by kidnapping and roasting a comedian, doping a friend-with-benefits and having a party for everyone who thinks they know him.

Quick sketches to send to Heads of Departments as the script changes keep on coming

Alana, straight and narrow

First of all, I just have to say it: Alana drives me mad. Thoughtful and sensitive, how can the girl be so wrong, wrong, wrong about so many things? She’s our darling daring Little Red Riding Hood in the woods having a picnic with the monster who ate her granny.

Back in Season One, when I gave Carolyn Dhavernas a cook’s tutorial for her first kitchen scene – chopping carrots with Hannibal -- she showed excellent knife skills. But, in character while doing the scene, she was so reckless with the knife I was on edge the whole time. Blithely drinking a little too much in that first scene with Hannibal, Alana was charmingly guileless, headstrong and a little drunk on Hannibal’s cellar-brewed People Beer. I didn't realize it back then but Carolyn had her character totally nailed. It was a real foreshadowing of this episode’s seduction scene when Alana drinks a little too much of Hannibal’s poisoned wine and as a result, she misses entire chunks of the evening. Like when he slips out of bed to get the fixin’s for a midnight snack -- roast thigh.

Eddie's thigh baked in clay with marrow and tiny Lady Apples on the side

Surprise, it’s Eddy’s thigh

Up til now, the script had called for Alana having lasagna with Hannibal. I got my first clue there would be a thigh roasting when I heard my phone chirping just after midnight as I’m on my way home. It’s Bryan Fuller asking cheerfully, “Hi Everyone! We would like to so a Braised Roast of Eddie Izzard’s thigh. This shoots Friday (tomorrow). Any interesting tidbits about history of roast…or anecdote…? What can we do with a whole joint – bone and all…”

Jose Andres, our food consultant in DC, replies with a suggestion of cooking the roast in clay so Hannibal can lecture Gideon about man being made of clay and returning to clay. It’s 1 o’clock in the morning.

This is a wonderful idea! I email Bryan and Jose my thoughts on how it would be done for camera: Hannibal rubbing herbs into a thigh-sized cut of meat, rolling, barding and wrapping it in lotus leaf, then covering it in thin sheets of clay using a wire garrotte he just happens to have in his batterie de cuisine (stored next to the mace).

It’s 2:30 am. I need to know how it will play in the script because to be ready for Friday’s shoot, I have to order the special “people-sized cuts” from the butcher in the morning before he cuts all the pork sides out into normal roasts and chops.

Roman cauliflower studded with purple cauliflower to go with the Clay-roast Thigh

Late to bed early to rise – back to the market to get those thighs…

Bryan promises to send me script revisions by 5 or 6am. Good because the butchers bring out the big knives around 6am and by 9 it’s too late to get special cuts. It’s almost 4am now so I sign off by telling Bryan I am going to dream of Beggar’s Chicken – an old Chinese peasant dish where you go outside and dig up wet clay from your yard to slather around a chicken which you have wrapped in lotus leaves.

While I sleep, I decide that I will use two double pork loins invisibly sewn together and trimmed to approximate the muscle size of Izzard’s thigh, boned. I figure I will need 4 roasts per page of dialogue to cover the number of takes. In the morning, I read the new pages in time to see I need 6 to 8 roasts. Ettie and Victoria (my assistants) and I spend the next 16 hours stitching loins together, rolling sheets of clay, pinching clay into vine leaves and roasting eight complete thighs, each wrapped tightly in its own clay coffin. One bursts in the oven, so I have seven camera-ready beauties by 4am - just enough time to grab a nap before I drive to set in time for the scene.

Video Village where producers and directors cluster around monitors to watch the scenes as they are being shot. Everyone has wandered off momentarily because we are frantically injecting water into the roast with a syringe so it will run with juice when Mads slices it on camera. Why frantically? The clay keeps plugging up the needle.

The kitchen scenes of Hannibal preparing the roast are TBS (to be scheduled). They don't get on the schedule til just before our second hiatus. Worry about matching those thighs later! There's a party scene going on....

In the foreground, a tray of Heart Tartare in Filo Flowers waits to go to set

Enough of thighs and sighs-- on to the party for a feeding friendy!

While the thighs have been roasting, the script for the party scene has changed from a sit-down dinner to a cocktail party. From a food stylist’s point of view, a cocktail party scene is the best. You get to do several extravagant pieces-montees for the central table and pretty decorated trays of hors d’oeuvres for the waiters to carry around the room, each morsel a jewel presented to the guests. Not like a sit-down dinner with crazy resets and keeping track of what each guest has on his plate for the dozen-plus takes of a dinner scene.

Roulade of beef stuffed with sushi rice and chive flowers

JellyTimbits stuffed with Foie Gras and Timbit slices topped with Headcheese

Squab drumsticks on Fresh Figs and Fig Newtons - claws bursting up from the underworld ( Fig Newtons = Cookie Hell) flailing heavenward, grasping for (your) lifeblood

For a cocktail party scene, you have the much easier task of resetting the waiter’s trays which gives you lots of time to chuckle about the extras who have greedily gobbled several hors d’oeuvres on the first take then are condemned to eat the same amount again and again for every take.

Boar's head with Sausage collar and Veggie Wig-hat. Couldn't get the eyes to close. Worst. Side eye. Ever.

Crayfish and octopus Ultimate Fighting with trout and squid

On location in a rambling home in outer Etobicoke, the scene shoots for about 10 hours. The party is swellegant yet scary as befits our Fancy Cannibal. Hannibal is of course one step ahead of everyone – just when they are all beginning to suspect he is The Ripper, he throws them a bone of a non-human kind.

Toss a bone to your friends, throw a party!

Recipes for your own "at Home" with Hannibal cocktail hour

Trays waiting to go to set

Heart Tartare Tarts

You can substitute chopped beef tenderloin for the heart in this recipe if you prefer - or go pescatarian and substitute chopped raw salmon (sushi grade, of course).

For heart tartare:

1/2 lb. veal heart, finely chopped

1 tsp olive oil

1 raw egg yolk (optional)

1 tsp capers
1 tsp chopped cornichon pickles
1 tsp red onions, finely chopped

salt, pepper to taste

For tart shells:

6 sheets filo dough (approx 12” x 18”)

½ cup melted butter

To make tartare:

1. Remove all silverskin, veins and connective tendons (the Chordae Tendineae - also called Heart Strings. Think about cow love and honour the beast)
2. Combine chopped heart, oil, yolk, cornichons, onions, capers, salt and pepper. Refrigerate until just before serving.

To make pastry shells:

1. Brush 1 sheet of filo dough with butter and place two more sheets directly on top. Brush the top with butter and layer on two more sheets. Butter the top layer and add remaining 2 sheets. Press lightly to stick layers together. Cut the stacked filo into 12 squares 3” x 3”, reserving offcuts for shards. Press squares into the rounds of a buttered mini muffing tin allowing corners of pastry to extend up from sides of the rounds. Bake at 375 until lightly browned.

2. Set aside to cool. Fill each shell with 1 - 2 tsp heart tartare just before serving.

To make decorative shards:

1. Cut pastry scraps into long triangular shards and place on buttered cookie sheet. Bake at 375 until golden brown. Set aside to cool. Spear into filled tart shells just before serving.

makes 12

Wagyu Beef Roulades

Rolling these is very easy if you use a bamboo mat such as is used for making Japanese maki sushi rolls. Otherwise, you could use a linen towel – as in the torchon method for making foie gras.

1 1/2-lb piece of wagyu beef sirloin, or beef tenderloin if you don't have the $300 for Wagyu

1 cup short grain rice for sushi

4 tsp seasoned rice wine vinegar**

1/4 cup Korean BBQ sauce*

(optional) Chinese chives, blanched

12 pc parchment paper about 5" x 5"

1. Place beef into freezer for 45 minutes to firm up the meat so it can be sliced thinly.

2. Cook rice according to directions, cool and mix in rice wine vinegar.

3. Remove beef from freezer. It should semi frozen. Cut across grain into 1/8-inch slices. Gently shape and pound slices into squares 4 inches x 4 inches on the pieces of parchment paper.

4. Turn a square of beef onto sushi mat, paper side up. Peel off and discard paper. Spread a thin layer of rice on beef and roll up tightly. Tie circumference of roll in three places with a Chinese chive or butcher’s string. Brush with Korean BBQ sauce. Repeat with remaining beef and rice.

5. Grill lightly just to sear beef. Cut each roll in half for hors d’oeuvre size.

* ¼ cup soy sauce, 1 T brown sugar, 2 tsp chili hot sauce, ¼ tsp crushed garlic

**1 Tbsp rice wine vinegar, 1 tsp sugar, ¼ tsp salt

Makes 12 roulades or 24 pieces

Prosciutto Roses on Watermelon

For multicoloured options, use cantaloup or honeydew melon as well as watermelon.

12 one-inch cubes watermelon, no rind

12 thin slices prosciutto

1. Form a rose from each slice of prosciutto: shape one end of slice into a small bud-like cone then loosely wind the remaining strip around it. Refrigerate for 20 minutes to firm the prosciutto then skewer each rose with a decorative toothpick and stick one onto each cube of watermelon.

Makes 12

Next week: Roast Beef in Plaid tell no lies

Stumbling down blind alleys

Bloodless tears stain your cheek,

Looking too close

You cannot see.

Twins in the dark.

Killer be killed.

Be free and bleed.

This episode of Hannibal is named Yakimono -- the course in Kaiseki dinner that is grilled meat, often marinated and skewered then seared over hot coals. Pretty much describes everyone in this episode after they each have a run-in with Hannibal.

When I get the script, I use the search function to get a quick idea of what food I will be required to make in the new episode. In Scene 51, Hannibal is taking a roast coming out of the oven. And that’s all. What, no smart dinner parties this week? I have a little anxiety attack -- the only thing worse than being overworked is not working.

There must be more food scenes somewhere...

I read through the whole script. It’s a jaw-dropping page-turner. I see the plot is thickening and boiling on so many burners it’s not surprising that Hannibal has no time to make dinner this week. I know how I feel after a week of having a lot of people over for a big party. Finding their cigarette butts in the herb wall. And he had to make that clay roast dinner too. Plus have a big sleep-over. And laundering that plastic suit. Really, sometimes all I can do is shove a roast in the oven and I don’t have half the things to do that Hannibal does WTHOUT HELP!!!! My advice to him is get a cleaning lady. OK, he may have a few things in the basement to hide – don’t we all. But you are who you are and as they say, no man is a hero to his valet. Hannibal, get help.

As I contemplate this episode's food styling duties, I wonder if it’s a people roast in the cannibal’s oven. Bryan Fuller, font of all that is Hannibal, emails to say he’d like it to be a nice roast beef. Hmmmm. Beef. This tells me that Hannibal is being very very careful. He knows people are beginning to talk so he should lay off the people-snacks for a while. I will make the most ostentatiously obviously-not-people beef ever roasted. Like a billboard in the oven that says “Move along…no people-eating to see here folks.”

the unseen giant roast beef

I imagine a full rib rack of beef on long bones. Frenched like a rack of lamb. My regular butcher doesn’t have the cut I want so I have to go to his competition. The new butcher is shocked at my request. I have to re-explain the whole ‘It’s for Hannibal” thing. I say, OK, like those dinosaur rib steaks you have – like that only the whole rib roast and don’t cut them into steaks. How many ribs asks the butcher, unsure of my sanity. Nine, I say, no, ten. Or twelve. What’s the maximum you can give me? (cows have 13 pairs) Nine, he says, getting used to the idea and starting to loosen up. Anything else is illegal because it would be from a deformed cow, he jokes. When it’s ready, John, my assistant, goes to get it and when he lugs it back to the studio, we gather around in awe of the sheer size of this giant thing of flesh.

OK it’s big. But big is not enough. It has to be Hannibalized. I think about Chris Hardagon, our wonderful wardrobe designer and I realize -- nothing says Hannibal more than a plaid suit! I can definitely make a plaid pattern on this sizable canvas of beef!

I score it in a diamond pattern like an Easter ham and lace the tracings with rosemary and thyme making a nice Crawford Tartan plaid. Bias-cut to be more slimming. Reminds me of my days as a couturier draping massive ballgowns on oversized Mothers of the Bride.

Enough of the beefing. Except to say I had to cut it down by one rib – it wouldn’t fit in the oven. That’s a big roast.

When we go to shoot the scene, the director says, “Isn’t that roast kind of big for one person?” One person? Hannibal is not one person. He is a surgeon, an artist, a psychiatrist, a flower-arranger, a gourmet cook, an oenophile, a brew-meister, a boy who lost his sister, a man who can’t stop killing, and a god. And he gets hungry.

Now you may be shaking your head and saying, I don’t remember seeing a big roast in this episode. Three little words: Cutting. Room. Floor. It didn’t makethe final edit.

So here is the only place you will see my plaid roast. So I’m also posting other meals not ready for broadcast but ready for you to share in the Hannibal joy.

More of your photos of the Hannimeals you've been making

Lindsay F sent a great photo of her Blue Plate Special: Huevos High Life and homemade pork sausage.

Lindsay's Huevos High Life

Aleks and Maria made a special dinner for friends to celebrate Hannibal’s Season 2 premier: Mushroom Cappuccino to start and delicious looking Not Meat Pie. Followed by Strawberry-Apple soup and ~~a bit of~~ drinking.

Mushroom Cappuccino

Not People Quiche

Marina & Alicia have Friday Foodie Hannibal dinners and sent photos. Roasted leg of lamb with gremolata, rosemary and garlic redskin potatoes, and asparagus.

Roasted Leg for Friday Foodies

Alex S says “I gave Hannibal's non-people silkie chicken soup a whirl last spring! I managed not to mess it up despite being a novice cook and it gave me the opportunity to check out the many Asian supermarkets near my home.”

Alex's Adventures in an Asian soupbowl

Katie and Aaron wrote: We'd been planning to do a dinner plus Hannibal night for a few weeks and finally pulled it off last night, to great success. 2 pix of Osso Buco

Osso Buco with Katie and Aaron

Shanks simmering on the stove

Jens wrote: Tried my hand at a variation of the tandoori liver. added fava beans (because liver and fava beans)and substituting risotto for couscous while adding honey for some sweetness to the match the liver and spices.

Jen's gorgeous results: Tandoori liver on couscous with fava beans

roast hearts

Hannichefs, thank you for sharing!

Next week: Will and Jack plan to go fishing but Hannibal has bigger fish to fry: Truite au Bleue.

Peter and Clark

Will and Hannibal.

Cowbird in a robin’s egg.

Hatched or hatcheted

Breaking shells won’t free them now.

The driver and the driven

Leashed together in their bloody tug of war.

Suza Kana is the course in a Kaiseki dinner that cleanses the palate. Usually a small vinegared dish of vegetable or seafood, it is light and refreshing. After reading the script, I’m not sure how light this episode is but at least none of the regulars get killed. That's refreshing...

Lots of hatching and dispatching this week-- eggs of melon "caviar" and duck.

Turducken, anyone?

A frightened Bird beating its wings like a heart in the chest of a dead Woman who is cocooned within a dying Mare. Did the murderer have Turducken for dinner?

Most of the murder tableaux on this show don’t make me hungry but this one had producer Sharon Seto and me talking about Turducken. That’s the dish that famously became the Thanksgiving dinner of choice for football fans in the late 1900s – a chicken stuffed inside a duck stuffed inside a turkey and roasted. Famed Cajun chef, Paul Prudomme secured a patent on it, but the idea of stuffing game and progressively smaller birds within each other like Matryoshka dolls dates back to Medieval times. It’s called Engastration, that is: stuffing into gastric passage.

It's raining Truite au bleu

Engastration may not sound particularly yummy but ye olde Tudors loved it. They made a festive pie from a wholeturkey stuffed with a goose, with a chicken then a partridge which was stuffed with a pigeon. Grimrod de la Reyniere, a bit of an embroiderer of facts gives his recipe for “Roti sans pareil” in his almanach for epicurians: a bustard stuffed with a turkey, a goose, a pheasant, a chicken, a duck, a guinea fowl, a teal, a woodcock, a partridge, a plover, a lapwing, a quail, a thrush, a lark, an ortolan bunting and a garden warbler stuffed with an olive. But Grimrod was outdone by a 17^thcentury Maharajah who is reported to have dined on a roast whole camel stuffed with a goat, a turkey, a chicken, a grouse and a quail within which was a sparrow.

But enough of Holiday meats. It’s fish, fish and more fish for your unfortunate food stylist this day.

my sketch to plan out the plates for ep 208

I read the opening scene of this episode with equal parts of creeping dread and bounding joy. Hannibal is in his kitchen torturing trout that Will has caught for dinner. This is fish caught while fishing with Fishbourne for Hannnifish. He’s making Truite au bleu.

First, you kill a fish…

Truite au bleu is one of those dishes that epicureans love. First of all it’s French. Really, really French. No one, not even the Chinese would go to this kind of trouble for dinner. You start with live trout. Then you knock it on the head or kill it with as little fuss as possible so the trout doesn’t know it’s in trouble. The Chinese way is to pierce its brain by running a chopstick through its mouth. (Mmm-mmm, appetizing, I hear you think.)

Japanese use a technique called Kaimin katsugyo where a thin wire is inserted at a specific pressure point, like acupuncture and the fish is immediately rendered brain dead but its spinal nervous system is still functioning so it’s in a kind of coma til you gut it.

You don’t want the fish to struggle for a couple of reasons. First is that the flesh will be sweeter and more tender if the fish is relaxed when it dies. The second reason is that you don’t want to manhandle the fish and accidentally scrape off any of the protective slime that coats the living fish. It is the slime that turns blue – well actually steely blue-grey, and gives the dish its visual appeal (Did I say appeal? No, not really)

I’ve done Truite au bleu for a film before and it was a banquet of 10. So I really didn’t think this scene would be a problem. The first time, I did it in the customary horseshoe shape – head turned toward the tail. But I want to do something more Hannibalesque. Something that alludes to the Engastration of the murder tableau. Trout regurgitating its own tail.

truite au bleu garnished with an octopus tentacle waiting for the consomme shower

I go to my neighbourhood fishmonger and buy a trout and after a quick struggle (Unfair, I’ll admit -- I have pliers* and a knife – the fish has nothing but a paper bag) I am able to produce something so disgusting looking, I know it is perfect!

Then you kill 49 more…

Because the trout has to look like the same ones Will and Jack fish out of his Frozen Stream of Happy Dreams, I ask the Prop Master to get me four to six dozen live trout from the same fish wrangler who supplied the trout for the fishing scene. All the same size, please – no larger than one pound so they fit on the plate. Even as I request this, I know it won’t be possible. I need them to stay alive because their slime starts to slide off when they die. So I ask him to deliver them in an ice slurry in some coolers by 9am the next morning. And I crossed my fingers that one of my assistants will be good at dealing death-blows to fish. As you might guess, everything that could go wrong does and it is wall-to-wall fishfighting right to the very second the director says “Action” three days later.

Platter of Truite au bleu around an epic battle fought between fish, cephalopod and flora, on land and sea.

While I am flipping trunkloads of fish, Jose Andres sends an email saying that Mads should gill-gut the trout in the kitchen scenes. I won’t say that I am dismayed when I learn that Mads has not any experience gill-gutting. Even if he has, to make the scene go smoothly, I will have to pre-gut them and stuff the guts back in so he can just stick his pinkie under the fishie’s gill cover and effortlessly pull out its entrails in one long blood-drooling garland. It is just one more little thing to add to my list of unsavoury time-consuming duties. At one point during pre-prep, the counters and table top of my kitchen are completely covered with a pestilence of tail-swallowing fish heads. It looks like a punishment from the gods but no, it is just another day with Hungry Hannibal.

Truite au bleu doesn’t really taste that fabulous, IMHO. Floured, coated in rolled oatmeal and pan-fried in salty butter is a much better way of cooking trout.

And you thought I was going to talk about Halanabals’ sex scene…..

White anchovies and salted baby squid with sea asparagus (samfire) and caper berries

* When shaping the trout like this, you need pliers: after gutting the fish, you slit the belly open all the way and open the abdomen, spreading it out flat. Then you put the needle-nose pliers through the mouth and grab the tail. Gently but firmly pull the tail through the mouth as far as you can. The teeth should keep it from sliding back. Put the fish on a square of parchment and poach in court bouillon. If you want to make it "au bleu", run the fish under wine vinegar until it goes whitish-grey-blue, then steam. If you want, you could stuff the trout with crab mousse before steaming.

Now for this week’s cook-along recipe:

I know you will not make Truite au bleu, so here’s a recipe for Chocolate Macarons. No reason – just that they are fun to munch on and this recipe was requested by Frederika “Newshound” Lounds.

Mini Chocolate Macarons

makes 3 dozen

1 cup sugar

1/2 cup toasted almond slivers

3 Tbsp best quality cocoa

2 extra large egg whites, room temperature

1/3 cup sugar

1/2 tsp vanilla

1. In a food processor, pulse 1 cup sugar, almonds and cocoa until finely powdered. Set aside.

2. In a large glass or metal bowl, beat egg whites with an electric beater on medium-high until frothy. Add vanilla and beat. Gradually add 1/3 cup sugar, beating constantly. Continue beating until egg whites form stiff peak.

4. Gently fold in cocoa-sugar mixture with a rubber spatula, one-third at a time. Do not over-mix but scrape down sides to ensure complete incorporation.

5. Preheat oven to 350 F. Line baking sheets with parchment.

6. Drop batter by teaspoon onto parchment-lined baking sheets in 1-inch drops, leaving 1 inch between each drop. When sheet is full, bang lightly on the counter a few times to flatten and to knock out any large bubbles.

7. Put in oven at 350F and immediately turn oven down to 250F. Bake for 15 to 20 min. If the baked macarons do not have a crinkly “shoulder” just below a smooth shiny dome, let the formed drops of dough sit in a cool dry place for an 1 hour before baking. If they are not slightly chewy in the centre, take them out of the oven sooner.

8. When cool, they can be filled, sandwich style with ganache or buttercream icing. For ganache, melt 5 oz. good quality dark chocolate in a mixing bowl over hot water. In another small bowl, beat 1/2 cup whipping cream until soft peak. Fold in 3-4 Tbsp rum or cognac if desired. Fold whipped cream into cooled chocolate. This is too much filling for this number of macarons but you can make chocolate truffles from the left over ganache. Put it in the fridge for 15 minutes to firm up so you can roll it into 1-inch balls, then dust them with icing sugar or cocoa or chocolate flakes. Store in a cool place.

Next week: Sanctomonte Omelettes made from by gypsies.

More dishes you've made for Hannibal and shared:

More and more of you are cooking along with Hannibal, so please continue to send me photos (janicepoon8@gmail.com) of Hannibal dinners you've made from my recipes or your own. Here are three more great ones!

Freddie's beautiful vegetarian Hannidiner

Freddie's photo of her non-vegetarian Hannidinner

Alex makes these HIgh Life Eggs every Friday morning to start the Hanniday off right

This just in: Joachim Reinhold, a vegan artist/writer with a very stylish approach to food sent these lovely photos from Germany. He has recrafted some of Hannibal's dishes into vegan meals. Great idea...you don't need a plastic suit to get an eggplant.

Joachim's vegan osso buco inspired by Episode 2 is made from eggplant and cannelloni

More eggplant and stuffed cannelloni from Joachim - reminds me of the shank in the masthead at the top of my posts

Thanks Freddie, Alex and Joachim for sharing your photos this week!

Gnashing teeth

Clashing knives

A mask for the child in the beast in the man.

Innocence or ignorance

Instinct or will

Pushing deeper, rising up.

Wild like the wind

Driven like the snow

Drowned like the sound of his sorrow.

Suziikana is the course in Kaiseki that is the main event. A substantial hot pot of rarest and finest ingredients. This episode is named for a meaty pot-boiler.

The pling of an incoming text wakes me.

It’s from Stephen, the prop master. He says: New pages. Dining room scene shooting Monday.

MONDAY? This has really caught me napping. I had been checking constantly and the last script I saw didn’t have any food in it at all so I was kind of relaxing and lazing about. I leap up and immediately email the script supervisor who is the person who circulates the script revisions. She says there are no new pages. OK. Fine. I’ll go back to sleep. But I know there must be new pages so I start emailing everyone til finally I get a new script.

I have only two working days to prep so I scan the rewrites worriedly. If I have to order anything special there is very little time (kill days at the abattoir are Tuesdays and Thursdays and it takes a week to pre-order odd cuts of beef pork or lamb – it can take many more to purvey stranger beasties)

This is my sketch for this episode's meal that Hannibal serves to Jack

It seems we are working with leftovers.

Hannibal making dinner with leftovers you whisper disbelievingly? Yes, Virginia. Leftovers. A quick review and a chat with the prop master confirms it:

Let me explain: You know how sometimes you find yourself staring in the fridge at assorted tupperware-encased remains wondering how you can combine them into a stunning dinner for two? What fabulous meal can I make from a half an onion, six chocolate macarons and a turkey leg? Or salmon eggs, liverwurst and wilted green beans.

Episodic tv can be like that. We had shot cooking scenes for episode 6 that got dropped in the final edit. Toss ‘em out? Never!! Can’t let fresh footage go to waste!!! There are film makers in other hemispheres who are starving!! We have all this lovingly shot footage of sweetbreads being sautéed – liver being sliced with a blood-streaked knife – kidneys being chopped. Robyn Stern (Jose Andre’s researcher) had worked on how these organs could be shot and they were great. Definitely too good to waste. But what could Hannibal make out of them?

A slice of Sacromonte Omelet with a duck eggshell filled with salsa and a quail egg filled with sea salt. On the side, purple baby potatoes and grilled clementine

Sweetbreads, liver and kidneys can go into Sancromonte Omelets declares Jose -- Hannibal can talk about his memorable days with the gypsies of Spain! So omelets it is. I make them as frittatas because 1) they’re Spanish and 2) wedges of egg-potato tortillas are much easier to reset than fluffy French omelettes which would have to be made on set, a la minute -- not my idea of a tranquil day at work. Plus we just had Hangtown Fry in Episode 5 and if I don’t watch Hannibal’s cholesterol levels, who will?.

I sketch up a plan of how I think the meal should look and what I plan to have on the table as accompaniments. This gets emailed off to everyone and I even have time to put in a request for wine suggestions from Robyn.

Side platter of Spanish olives, sweet tiny red peppers, spiced almonds

I don’t imagine that Mads and Lawrence want to eat lamb’s brains and testicles – which is what is called for in authentic Sacromonte Omelets – so I make them instead with chicken, potato and red pepper - pans and pans of them and cart them off to set.

Side platter of anchovies crawling on tomatoes and fresh basil uprooted from black quinoa "dirt"

Unloading the car into the studio is always a bit of a joyless task but I cease to feel sorry for myself when I run into Jaro Dick, the set decorator. Isn’t he supposed to be on location at the museum downtown? I’m pretty sure I saw that on the call sheet. No. The location didn’t work out. At the last minute they couldn’t swing it and had to build the museum set in the studio. WHAT??? I will never feel sorry for myself again. At least no one expects me to build a massive dinosaur room overnight. I get crabby because I'm expected to magically produce suckling pigs and leaping trout out at a moment's notice, but no one has ever asked me to erect 2 or 3 dinosaurs overnight. But Jaro was taking it in stride. Just another day in tv land.

Plates waiting to go to set

The shoot goes smoothly ( the frittata is a breeze to plate - why can't all food come in wedges?) and I manage to get home before dawn. Another episode done. Only three more to go. I don't know whether to be happy or sad about that.

But never mind the joys and sorrows of tv-making. Let's eat!

It’s time to whip on those aprons and head to the kitchen to make some delicious frittata. You can make this simple but delicious treat with any leftovers and turn them into a wonderful lunch dish. The main ingredients are eggs and potatoes. The rest is up to you. And you need a non-stick slope-sided pan. I use a well-seasoned cast iron omelette pan.

Chick n Cheese Frittata

6 eggs

¼ cup cream

¼ tsp salt, pepper to taste

1 tsp butter

1 large cooked potato, in 1/8-inch slices

½ medium onion, in ¼-inch slices, pan-fried until translucent

½ cup cooked chicken in ½-inch dice

½ cup peas

½ cup diced bell peppers

2 oz cheese thinly sliced

1. In a small mixing bowl, beat eggs with cream, salt and pepper.

2. Over medium heat, melt butter in omelette pan. When butter is bubbling and beginning to brown, pour in a third of the beaten egg to cover bottom of pan. In a single layer, add a third of the potato slices and sprinkle in a third of the chicken, a third of onions and a third of the cheese. Repeat twice.

3. Continue cooking over medium heat until egg has mostly set then place under broiler to finish cooking egg and melting cheese. Brown the top.

4. Cut into wedges and serve with a salad. If you have any left over, this is also great eaten right out of the fridge.

Next week: This dish could sure use some ginger...

And for those of you munching along at home:

I am delighted with the way you are diving into the recipes and thrilled with what great cooks you are and how artfully you are presenting your dishes! Here are more Hannibal cook-alongs that you have sent to me for sharing:

Brian S created this elegant dish of lamb kidney garnished with prosciutto rose on apple.

Brian's absolutely gorgeous Lamb kidney and mushroom

CFO Winkle made osso buco and the spinach stuffed loin from season 1

CFO's Osso Buco beginnings

CFO's Osso Buco simmering in the pot

CFO's wonderful looking stuffed loin

CFO's stuffed loin sliced

Rachel F made the chocolate macarons – vegan ganache made with non-dairy chocolate and coconut milk.

Rachel garnished her yummy looking macarons with kumquats and strawberries

Brian’s breakfast Huevos - brilliantly garnished with avocado, tomato and black beans almost to lovely to eat!

A beautiful way to start the day cooked by Brian S

Stefano W from Italy made a roast in clay served with apple and roast potatoes – not surprisingly, none of his friends wanted to sacrifice a leg for dinner so he used pork tenderloin...

Tenderloin wrapped in clay and artistically decorated by Stefano

Just out of the oven - Wow!

Looking delish with caramelized apples and roasted potatoes

Thank you for sharing!!!!!!!!!