Try frying up a little alligator ball

Stealth seemed in order for this adventure.

As I stood behind my kitchen counter preparing dinner, my fifth-grader and I debated the answer to a math problem and which part of a particular sentence was the predicate.

I avoided all talk of dinner.

I minced shallots and onion and a small amount of celery. I walked to the garden for some parsley. Then I placed another cutting board on the counter and started chopping a piece of meat that looked something like a chicken breast, but not quite as compact.

At no time did my daughter ask, "Mom, what's for dinner?"

In fact, it was only after finishing a pile of fried "meat" balls that she said, "Mom, that was good. It tasted kind of like shrimp. What was it?"

"Alligator," I deadpanned. The "how could you?" look materialized along with an edict that she would never again eat alligator, on the grounds that the alligator would have wanted to eat her first. True enough. But I rather liked the alligator. I had expected it to mimic chicken, but it tasted better than that. And it was easy to cook.

Our alligator came from Frog Island Seafood Inc., which is in Barco, N.C., on the way to Nags Head where the road forks off to Elizabeth City. Frog Island is an immaculate, well-stocked seafood market that also sells hundreds of homemade crabcakes each week during the summer.

I found the alligator lurking in the freezer in 1-pound packages that hail from Palmetto, La. The pouch says the meat is marinated in salt and herbs and spices and promises a "prime fillet." It cost $9.99, and the market double-bagged it in ice for no extra charge. (For the non-cooks, the market's small restaurant also serves deep-fried "alligator bites" for $6.99.)

At home, the fillet slipped out of the package in two separate pieces. The meat has a delicate seafood scent and is the color of uncooked chicken, but it is quite a bit tougher. The hardest part about preparing it is chopping the meat in small enough pieces so that it won't be too tough to chew. Some of the meat had to be shaved off of the tough silver skin, which made brawn a bit of a factor. My advice: Make sure your knife is plenty sharp.

Greg Benhard, president of Louisiana Premium Seafoods Inc., the company that packed the alligator I bought, said all alligator is tough. The fillets come from the tail, and his company tenderizes the meat - mostly from wild gator from the swamps of south Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi and Florida - and then marinates it in a liquid that is "mainly papaya" to tenderize it further.

Alligator is pretty lean stuff. A 4-ounce serving has only 90 calories, 1 carb and 1.5 grams of fat. Of course, I ruined all that by frying up little "alligator balls" in oil.

But the result was worth eating, crispy bites of firm and filling meat with an unmistakable taste of the sea, a nice change of pace from ho-hum weekday dinner fare.

Lorraine Eaton, (757) 446-2697, lorraine.eaton@pilotonline.com