Coconut
I find out that living in the suburbs, you end up being sheltered from a lot of things. I used to go grocery shopping for myself, back in the days when my crazy retail schedule meant I missed pretty much every single family meal. I went to the produce section, and there was always the typical selection of fruits and vegetables. Apples, bananas, broccoli, and cauliflower, nothing out of the ordinary. Once in a great while, maybe some pineapples.
But when I go to the local food store in the city, the produce section is twice as large, half of it filled with fruits and vegetables I have never seen before. Small fruits, large gourd-like vegetables, and sitting in a large brown pile: Coconuts.
I have eaten coconut many times before. Coconut chocolates, coconut drinks, and those doughnuts with the coconut shavings on them. But I have never actually SEEN a coconut. It was brown, covered in dry fibers, and three brown spots like I had always seen in cartoons. I always thought those brown spots were just artistic license for some reason, just like when someone gets dizzy and their eyes get all spinny. But no… there they are looking at you like some odd face.
So, excited at the prospect of actually eating the coconut and humming ‘I’ve got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts,’ I picked one up and bought it. Getting into a coconut is hard work. It took a hammer, screwdriver, and nails to get into the coconut to get to the juice inside. I expected it to be milky white, you know, like coconut milk in the cartoons, but is was actually pretty clear, and tasted horrible.
My fiance tells me that coconut is usually sweetened, and that eating coconut by itself was going to be very different. After her father took the coconut out back and smashed it on the floor, I tried a piece. She was right. It wasn’t bad, just much different than I expected. I tried it the Mexican way, with chili powder and lime on top, which was not bad, but had a very strong flavor I really could only eat a couple of bites of.
The best thing to come out of it was putting a splash of the coconut juice in a glass of Coke, making what we called the CocoCoca-Cola. It was pretty good. I need to try it with chocolate powder and coconut juice so it can be a CocoacocoCoca-cola.
Try saying that three times fast.
You’ll sound like Coco from Foster’s, as we found out.
Maybe she could endorse it.
You know, Coco’s cocoacocoCoca-cola.
Zel-kun out.