Cooking alligator has always facinated me. Maybe its cooking game, maybe the fact that I’m eating it and its not eating me, maybe its a tropical thing, I don’t know.  I have eaten the jowls, the top tail, the tenderloin, the leg meat and a mix of who knows what, but it has all been good.

Gator’s in Florida are hunted wild, during season of course, or raised and slaughtered on farms.  These snappers were scares a while back, but are plentiful now. When I came to Florida 24 years ago, I was doing a paper in college on salinity influx from the ocean, inland.  This is when I saw my first Florida alligator on the side of a backwoods dirt road.  Kind of odd looking creature I thought, none like I have ever seen before. As I drove closer I noticed that it wasn’t that funny looking, but very dead... and tailless.  The poor bastard had reared it’s head at the wrong time and had got his ass shot, drug out of a deep roadside ditch and was now having it’s butt toasted in someone's backyard while the rest of him was collecting fly’s somewhere east of Okeechobee.

I like gator fried, sautéed, in sauce, as jerky and smoked. IIll pass along some recipes here and have some available for you to purchase.  Fresh alligator is great, but fresh frozen is not bad either.