Nuts about Coconuts??

I used to live in a place in northern Brazil where I never wore a shirt or shoes and I never drank water (I drink coconut "water", in Brazil coconut "milk" is the creamed stuff).

Almost anywhere in Brazil you can buy a chilled fresh coconut. They'll open its top and put a straw in it.

I drank and ate so many coconuts that now I only like the sugary processed coconut stuff.

Mmm *licks lips*. I have never eaten a coconut fresh from a tree, just imported ones. Makes me think about sitting on a hammock by a beach...
I'm not a great coconut water fan, but fresh from the tree...

One of my favourite dinners is chicken breast cooked in Hawaiian marinade.....about fifteen minutes before it comes out of the oven, I add sun-dried tomatoes and coconut.....mmmmmmmmmm

Yum, tomatoes and coconut are a classic combination!
As are coconut and chocolate, mm!
I am feeling hungry!

Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don't.....

Rae, I didn't notice before that you live at Cocoa beach, what a lovely (and delicious!) sounding name!

Cocoa Beach.....ahhhhhh home! We have coconuts AND bananas growing wild here. Yum!

I think coconut is one of those fruits on my "not to eat" list. c.i.

Good thing it's not a fruit....

Sounds very nice, Rae!
Guess I'll just have to satisfy myself with Scottish raspberries and strawberries until I make it over to Florida for an A2K gathering

That would be lovely, ThinkZinc!

Oh yeah ~ sliced strawberries with that chicken dish is wonderful, too!

green curry - probably my favourite use of any coconut product <sigh>

http://www.e-lopers.com/community_thai.htm

I've got a lovely bunch of ...

beth,...Green Curry Duck,..mmmmmm,...my FAVORITE food!!

Check out this website for recipes and tips for opening coconuts.

Recipes and Native Coconut Foods


Quick way to crack open a coconut:

Hold coconut over a bowl in one hand such that the "midriff" rests in the middle of your palm, with the tip on one end and the eyes on the other.
Whack the coconut with the back (that is to say the blunt of the cleaver a few times all around the center until it cracks open cleanly into two nearly equal halves. Make sure you use the blunt side of the cleaver.
Catch the juice in the bowl as it drains from the cracks.

You can also smack it pretty hard against the riser of a concrete step. That works too.

I once spent 10 days on a Pacific Island, their only source of outside income was copra. Man, you can eat a lot of coconut there!

Funny thing is my favs were young coconut, juice is great and you can eat the beginning of the white meat- it's sort of a slippery jelly. When the coconut has sprouted and the sprout is about a foot long you can yank it off the nut, peel off the outer leaf and eat the central shoot. THEN you can split open the nut, the juice has by then been converted into a gooey sweet mass.

You can bake them too. Yummy.

The Islanders favourite relish was made by emptying a mature nut of juice, filling it with coconut meat, some chillies and filling it with salt water and letting the whole thing ferment in the sun. Revolting, if you want to know - but very popular there.

The instructions here for "opening" a coconut are for coconuts when 99.9999% of the work is done. Try it when it has the husk. :-)

Mr Stillwater,

I love the sprout. The only thing better than that is copra that has dried inside the nut, absorbing all the water. In that state the meat is more grey than white.

What about Thai red curry crab?

Loooooooots of coconut in that recipe!

Craven , I also got to try cocoa beans. The seeds are in a husk filled with a sticky, sweet jelly (common thread here).

The funny thing was that the orange trees that had been planted years before and abandoned were absolutely HUUGE!! And the fruit had reverted to a dry flesh with no juice or sweetness.