Episode 1 Kaiseki

The truth,

When it finds you,

Cuts like a hot hot knife.

 

Slashing faith,

Severing ties,

Stabbing through your heart.

 

Spurting a red river of lies.

Who has the will

The strength

To staunch it?

Season Two! It’s amazing to be back! 

             Back with the team at Hannibal -- that great roiling stew of wild imaginations and incredible talents cooking together until, unbidden, the unspeakable images of horrible beauty start to bubble and break surface in our collective minds. And back with you fabulous Fannibals -- smart, artistic, enthusiastic and wonderfully sardonically funny. We have got a lot of shocking surprises for you in Season Two. But really, I can't wait to see what YOU have in store for US.

 Kaiseki  begins...

The opening episode is called Kaiseki. I am hotly anticipating the food scenes because Kaiseki is the highest form of Japanese cuisine – which, even at its lowest form is more refined, symbolic and artful than any other. Based on a deep and ancient philosophy of nature and seasons, it is a dozen-plus course meal of small plates that are meticulously prepared and served in formal, codified order on antique dishes of subtle beauty. At about $350 per person.

All summer, I had been anticipating the food scenes because back in July, Bryan had asked for thoughts on Kaiseki and asked if any part of human flesh looks like sliced flounder. I responded that there are several formulae for bleaching flesh developed mainly for the poultry industry because consumers prefer breast meat to thigh. (A bit of hydrogen pyroxide is all it takes to bleach those low-rent thighs so they look just like breast meat!)

Having a vegetarian for dinner?

We tossed around ideas of what vegetarian food Hannibal could serve Dr Chilton who has lost (how careless) a kidney and is on a restricted diet. I suggest a marrow squash soup where the middle has been scooped out to look like bone marrow. See what I did there? Well nobody else did and this sketch goes into the shredder.

my first stab at Chilton's vegetarian dinner

At last, the first script of the second season is circulated. I tear into it the moment it arrives. Devouring it. Drinking in its images: orange-fleshed sea urchins and thinly sliced sashimi balancing on a fishbone. Ash-baked celery root smoldering in a coffin of salt. Dining on nightmares. Will. Wendigo. Wonderful.

Back to designing the food for the screen - making it cinematic, as Bryan says. I circulate sketches and get no response – this is not a bad thing – everybody is madly working on the next urgent thing, so no news is good news.  I call up Hashimoto, a Kaiseki master and go over everything with his son Mark. They generously offer to come to the shoot to make sure we don’t commit any crass transgressions of the multitudinousness of ancient Kaiseki correctness.

my sketch after reading the script

Pre-production will start in early September. Small problem: I’ll be at a conference in Buenos Aries. Big solution: coffee shops and hotel lobbies. I’m still in awe of how easy it is to get things done using other people’s WiFi.

Well, easy-ish…

We need live sea urchins so Mads can lift the orange flesh out of the shell when he’s making dinner for Laurence. Two searches, a phonecall, and a sinking feeling inform me that sea urchin is not in season. A week after the shoot, markets will be awash in sea urchins but when we shoot, there will be none commercially available. And they need to be alive because as soon as they die, all the spines drop off and what you have is the shellfish version of a Chinese Crested Hairless dog. Just that ugly.

West Coast fishmen to the rescue!

Over the phone, a nice person at the Sea Urchin Harvesters Association tells me about a tiny west-coast fishing town, Steveston where independent sea urchin divers with small boats are allowed to sell off-season to people at the wharf.  By sheer happenstance, I have a niece, Melissa, who is visiting her in-laws in that very town. She agrees to go to the wharf and finds a diver who will get the sea urchins. We are on first base!

I will not bore you here with further whining about how hard it is to ship sea creatures on a long weekend (Yes, it is a long weekend as shooting starts on Season 2). Even if you have a nephew who works for AirCargo it will take three days.  Sea urchins die in two and their spines start falling out from stress as soon as they hear they are flying Air Canada.

I decide that we need to mercy-kill the sea urchins when they are fresh and healthy then cure them in a way that keeps the spines on. Google says this is not possible but that’s not the answer I want, so I call my taxidermist at ProLine for advice. He is a true artist who happens to work in dead animals and he says No problem. Just bury them in salt.

sea urchins with heavy make-up

Melissa does the dirty work, haggling with the divers for the best urchins then killing, cleaning, and burying them in salt. Twenty pounds of it. We are on second!

But the wretched urchins won’t dry out completely in her humid coastal town. Plus they are no longer bright red. They’ve gone sad brown. So, emailing from Buenos Aries, I ask her to FedEx them immediately to my assistant Ettie in hotter, drier Toronto. She has agreed to finish off the drying process, glue the dropped spines back on and spray paint them glossy red. Two days later I get an email from Ettie that the urchins have arrived – spines intact! And quite dry. We store them with charcoal to eliminate the sea smell.

            We are rounding third, but for a home run, we need large fresh uni from the sushi supplier to place into the dried, painted shells. The (English-speaking) sushi supplier cannot get the big ones he had promised so I have to go to another (English-challenged). Which is alright since I have to switch hamachi suppliers too.

Hamachi? Problems there? Yes, this is to be expected – but hardly the fun-fest of getting the sea urchins. Just business as usual.

Kaiseki dinner complete. Now think about Will's nightmare when Wendigo watches over dinner and Will coughs up a few memories.

I know, Will...Wendigo always gives me acid reflux too.

Was it the pizza Will ate last night

that gave him such a nightmare...

The shoot goes great. Francisco (set decorator) and I collaborate on Will’s  Wendigo Hallucidinner. (What, ear again???) 

Would you like fries with that? I SAID WOULD YOU LIKE FRIES?

While we buzz around setting up the table, the camera crew shoots the sea urchin scene. The sea urchins look alive, Hashimoto trims the yellowtail  and shows Mads how to slice like a sushi master.

Kaiseki master Hashimoto with Martha deLaurentiis and me on set

 Laurence loves yellowtail sashimi and so does Mads -- their chopsticks flying through the retakes. We go through every last bit of hamachi –I had bought a few hundred dollars worth and it was just enough.

Francisco and I are still piling food flowers horns bones and bugs onto the hallucidinner table when the crew moves to the next food scene: Hannibal serving Chilton a Salt-baked Celeriac. It’s a dish made famous at Brett Graham’s Michelin-starred restaurant, The Ledbury. His celery root is baked in a shell of browned salt and flour dough but I decide to go with a shell of pure white salt rubbed with ashed celery leaves. I want it to look like a baby Wendigo hatching from an icy snowball from hell.

Ash-baked celeriac (celery root) in salt crust with Samphire (sea asparagus)

watermelon carpaccio with spiced feta cheese 

Up next...Hallucidinner. Did that tentacle just smell me? 

I'm down to my last few celeriac slices when the AD calls “moving on”. Which means we are finished that scene and are moving on to the Hallucidinner. The AD calls "Final touches" and we all rush in to make sure everything looks great. Glycerine is applied to meat to make it look juicy...water is sprayed on leaves and flowers for a dewy look...Fabreez is spritzed on the octopus to keep it smelling like a rose - after all, it has a "bit" in this scene.

the endless feast of Will's hallucination

We rush around doing Final Touches while at the head of the table, Wendiguy looks  more bored than ominous.

Wendigo gets a horn adjustment before his big dinner scene

More on roasting things in encased in salt 

An addendum to  Chapter Celeriac. Compared to faking live sea urchin, making the salt-baked celeriac in ash had been a piece of cake -- well, 36 cakes because of the length of the scene we needed three dozen celeriac roots. Especially easy for me because Ettie and John (my new apprentice and mixologist - every serious kitchen has someone in charge of cocktails) had gone ahead and baked all of them while I was away, snoring in a Buenos Aires meeting hall.

Salt-baking was used in traditional Chinese Hakka cuisine, you wrap your chicken in lotus leaf and bury it salt in a large heavy pot. Then you put it on the fire on low and go out to a Jackie Chan movie. When you get home, you take the pot off, throw out the salt, unwrap you steaming tender chicken and dive in with both chopsticks. 

This is a centuries-old country dish that previously was eaten only by wealthy salt merchants when salt was the sel in salary. Slow-baking in salt is something I usually consider a waste of salt. A travesty. Between the desiccating sea urchin and baking celeriac, I went through about 50 lbs of the stuff.

A salt-bake treat to impress your vege-pescatarian friends 

Lately, smarty-pants chefs from Copenhagen to Frederick to Sydney have been  putting salt-baked root vegetables on their menus. You can salt-baking everything from fish to chicken to beets and pears, but I think it works best with people meats. So if you want to try salt-baking, here’s an easy recipe for fish to try:

Jenny, co-host of Second Course  podcast, this recipe is for you!

Salt-baked Snapper

Serves two with roasted mixed vegetables and aioli or hollandaise sauce.

3 lbs. sea salt

1 egg white – or 2 if eggs are small

1 Tbsp water

1 T fennel seed

2 ½ - 3 lb whole fish such as snapper or branzino, gutted, gills removed

handful of herb sprigs such as rosemary, thyme, parsley

2  thick lemon slices, halved into semi-circles

4 T olive oil

1.  Preheat oven to 400.

2. In a medium sized mixing bowl, whisk egg white til frothy with a fork. Add water and whisk til combined. Add salt all at once and fennel seeds. Mix thoroughly til all the salt is damp and clingy  -- like sand when you are making a sand castle. To test consistency, take a couple tablespoonsful in your palm and make a fist, crushing salt together. When you open your hand, salt should hold together in a ball. If not, froth another egg white with water and add a bit at a time to the salt mixture until it holds together. Don’t add too much or it will be a struggle to crack the salt shell once it’s baked. Set aside.

3. Line a baking sheet with a sheet of baking parchment and place about ½ cup of salt mixture in the middle. Spread out to the approximate length and width of your fish. Tamp down to a thickness of about ½ inch. Rub fish with olive oil and place on top of the salt. Stuff cavity with lemon slices and herbs. Spoon the rest of the salt mixture on top and sides, pressing over the fish so the fish is completely encased in a ½-inch layer of salt.

4. Roast for 20 - 25 minutes. Remove from oven and rest for 5 minutes. To serve, transfer to a wooden cutting board and serve.

5. To serve: At the table, crack the salt shell by tapping with a mallet then carefully remove the salt shards, brushing salt bits away from the fish or they will make the fish too salty. Pull away the top layer of skin, using a sharp thin knife to detach the skin from the gill, fins, and tail. Using a wide fork, lift the meat off the bones and serve onto individual plates. When the top side has been served, remove the bone by lifting the head up and away toward the tail. All the small bones will come away with the spine. Remove the fin bones and serve the bottom half of the fish meat, leaving the skin on the salt crust. Have a martini. You’ve earned it.


And if you're still interested in laughing at my life, an interview with Deadshirt and one with MSN Entertainment 

Next week...

You really have got to see Mad's special way with Osso Buco. I"m not kidding. You have got to watch next week.

Oeuf redux: Huevos High LIfe

Eggs and mushroom tea.

Break the fast

Break the cup

Shards can hold no poison.

Leaping Quantum

Time to no time

Replay: Teacups 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 thin layer at 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

Hannibal Dinner, Popped

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 at The 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.

Ep 13: Savoureux - Tete de Veau

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 Prop 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!