Alligator, Simmered in Coffee

We have been blessed with many gifts from people as we prepare to leave for Africa, but we just received one of the coolest ones (and probably most practical) this week. Some good friends of ours, Dave and Becky Durham, aka Eric's sister Sami's inlaws, invited us over to lunch and presented us with a Wycliffe cookbook. For those of you who don't know Wycliffe, it's a Bible translation organization that sends missionaries to the far corners of the Earth to translate the Bible into every tongue. This usually results in the missionaries travelling to rather remote, primitive locations. For those of you know don't know Dave and Becky, they were missionaries to Western Europe for a number of years, and currently reside in Nashville. Dave's blog on many different cultural lessons and observations can be found here.

Anyway, they used this cookbook while they were over in Europe, and the benefit is that all the recipes feature easily obtained (relatively so) ingredients for people living overseas. None of the recipes involve canned foods or mixes (as in, add a can of cream of mushroom soup, or add a yellow cake mix). It also contains a number of more exotic recipes and tips. Our favorite so far is learning that if your alligator meat tastes too "gamey", you can simmer it in strong coffee for 6 hours to improve the flavor. Or another useful tip, green papaya can be used as a meat tenderizer. It's sort of like MacGyver cooking. Thanks for such a fun gift, Dave and Becky!