The whole coconut is one of the few high-maintenance gourmet items I remember seeing in the IGA growing up in the culinary wasteland known as the Seventies. The little pile of hairy balls (YESS!) in the produce aisle was a perpetual source of fascination and mystery, an item so beyond the pale of my mother's grocery list that the purchase of one was as likely as my getting a pony for my birthday (THANKS FOR NOTHING, mom and dad). It's difficult for me to imagine any Carter-administration housewife, even one as industrious and skilled in the kitchen as my own mom (ponyless childhood notwithstanding), doing anything with a whole coconut aside from using it as part of a centerpiece at a "Trader Vic's" party. Maybe they cracked them in half and served blender drinks in them? I doubt there was a secret authentic-curry subculture fomenting in suburban Connecticut that I was unaware of, and which the Danbury IGA was supplying.So I'm trying to be the coconut-buying type of mom, if not the pony-buying variety. My kids usually request a small treat in exchange for good behaviour at the grocery store, which is only fair. The grocery store was the site for many of my long dark midnights of the mothering soul when the boys were babies/toddlers, so the stress-free trips we now enjoy are worth a little lagniappe for the dudes. I love it when they choose something food-adventuresome. We recently brought home this coconut and dismantled it according to the useful and detailed instructions in my battered copy of Joy of Cooking. You can see the many implements of destruction involved in its demolition. The boys were far more intrigued by the process than by the slightly-lame end product you see in the bowl above. Unsweetened coconut is. . . meh. It tastes best consumed on a ramshackle barge in the West Indies along with copious rum drinks. If I had been feeling WonderWoman-ish I could have gone on to make my own coconut milk by grating the meat, boiling it and squeezing the results out of the gratings with cheesecloth and blah blah blah. . . coconut milk from a can is one of the best pantry items there is and one of the only canned goods I do not begrudge the Watergate-era housewife one whit. Perhaps I will crack a coconut for non-experimental, non-child-amusement reasons when Barack Obama and his family come to my house for dinner and I make them an authentic Thai meal, an event my boys are dead certain is going to take place any day now.
4 comments:
Some of the most amazing and delicious fruit I ate while on the beach in Ibiza was a piece of coconut, knocked straight from the furry hairball itself. But, you're right about the ambience being everything. When I tried to recreate the experience at home, the coconut was, indeed, just meh.
You make another good point about coconut, though. It's the ultimate little boy's fruit. One must use IMPLEMENTS of DESTRUCTION to eat this fruit. How exciting if you're having testosterone bursts every seven minutes or so.
Maybe there's a freshness issue involved, too? I had some on "The Rum Runner" while quaffing spiked punch on a bay in Grenada and it was much better than the Wisconsin grocery-store variety.
Whole pineapples are another treat, but a little easier to manage. I used to buy those occasionally for my kids for the wonder of getting something so delicious out of something so nasty looking.
Last year, in the annals of "thinks the boys won't appreciate until they're older," we made triple-striped popsicles (lemon, blueberry and watermelon). I am hoping our dudes will one day be as cool as Jeremy is in his cheesecake video.
Post a Comment