So I completed Phase 2 of my "Pâté de Foie et de Porc en Brioche" last night....ground the meat and made the pâté. Today I'll take the chilled brioche dough, and the partially cooked pâté, and bake them together for the final step. Then chill for 24 hours and taste-test.

I'm concerned that the meat is not ground finely enough. Julia said to grind it on the medium blade of the meat grinder. I only have two blades, big and small. I used big. Hmmmm. Well, I'm only doing one batch first, so if it doesn't turn out I'll do it all finely ground next time.

Let me tell you, that meat grinding process was not pretty. I'm not squeamish or anything, but grinding pork liver was freakin' nasty. It turned into a foul-smelling purplish gooey pulp when I put it through the grinder. I was actually kind of grossed out during the whole rest of the pâté-making process, until I sauteed a spoonful of the mixture to taste and adjust the seasonings at the end. Then it was like, "Oh....yummy!"

That's the thing about French food. If you think about some dishes, they seem somewhat disgusting (not really though, if you compare to McDonald's), but then you taste them and they taste so amazingly good. Snails? Every time I've made snails I've been slightly skeezed out, but then they taste so delicious with all the herbs and butter and garlic, slightly crusty on top in their pretty shells...mmmm.

When I was grinding the pork fat and liver and tenderloin with my fine Czech-made Porkert meat grinder (which broke a world record for meat grinding I'll have you know), I kept imagining that scene from The Wall where the English schoolboys march in a line and fall into a big meat grinder, to be turned into sausages, I suppose.

One interesting thing about grinding the meat...when I put the pork tenderloin through the large blade, it came out with a gross-looking consistency. But then I re-ran it through with the fine blade, and it came out magically transformed, looking exactly like the high-quality ground pork or beef that you buy at the supermarket. Because it looked familiar again, it became appetizing. It's all about your cultural frame of reference, I suppose.