Earlier in the week Ben ran into a guy from Quincy, about 20 minutes north of Tallahassee, who offered him Alligator meat! Living in Florida it is not really uncommon to run into alligator, in any form - alive or fried, but it can be really hard to get a hold of when you're looking. The major chain groceries store don't carry it and I've yet to see it at the local meat market. I wasn't as enthusiastic when I first heard the news, Ben has been refusing to eat any type of grain (this 'Paleo' thing that I don't really understand) and the best thing I could think of doing with some alligator meat would be chopping it up, breading it, frying it and serving it with a remoulade. I personally was excited about that, I do love me some gator bites - but knowing Ben wouldn't be eating them that way kind of ruined the thrill. So I set off to try something different.
Alligator meat is also really tough and kind of weird to work with. It's scaley almost. And tastes like a mix between fishy pork and chicken. In this dish though it is a little sweet and very delicious.
Alligator Etoufee
Ingredients:
2 lbs. alligator meat, cut into small strips
1 cup cooking sherry
1/4 cup flour
3 stalks celery, chopped fine
1 medium onion, chopped fine
1 bell pepper, chopped fine
4-5 cloves of garlic, also chopped up nice and fine
1/4 cup of oil
2 fingerhot peppers, chopped fine
2 cans of tomato paste
1 can of Rotel chopped tomatos
dash of white pepper, black pepper, and cajun seasonings
water
1. Heat the oil in a large pan. (since it was already out I ended up using a wok. it was a bad idea, we will get to that later). Add the vegetables and sautee ~5-10 minutes or until the onions are clear. It is usually a good idea to wait until halfway through to add the garlic, you can't go backwards from burnt garlic and you only really need to make it fragrant. You can also add the hot peppers in here or you can wait. The more you cook anything spicy the hotter it gets, chili peppers especially so be aware of that. Mine wasn't too spicy at all and I added them at this point.
2. I suspect the best way to begin this recipe is to start with a roux, because that's what seems to be the aim in the next step...though it's full of a lot of vegetables at this point and not what I think a roux should be at all...Anyway slowly add the 1/4 cup of flour, stirring constantly. Do this is small amounts and be sure to blend it thoroughly. The onions cooked out a lot of water, so for me there wasn't too much difficulty doing this but it did look awfully strange and I had my doubts about it. After mixing in the flour spoon in ~16 oz. of tomato paste and the cup of cooking sherry. You should get something that looks like this:
I also added a little water and a dash of sherry here and there to keep it at a reasonable consistency. You want to let this cook for 30 minutes on medium heat. The sherry will cook down into something delightfully sweet but be careful not to burn it! I can't imagine it would be too difficult, but in a wok...yeah, the wok was a stupid idea. 10 minutes later I had totally burnt the bottom layer of the sauce. I scraped a lot of black flecks out, but it was a major disappointment. So stir not so infrequently so this isn't a problem.
4. Serve over rice with some French bread. I also threw in some mustard greens to the plate because they are delicious and because a part of me had some intention to turn this into a po'boy. It made an excellent po'boy. If you want to skip the rice and just spoon it into a loaf of french bread with some greens and maybe other sandwichey things it is excellent. Wet and sloppy and crunchy and taste-y just like I think a good po'boy should be.
