How To Drink A Coconut

A few months ago Sears delivered me a new fridge and the deliverymen were a couple of seasoned Jamaicans who pushed and pulled the fridge up the stairs into the house on stilts I call home. I call it my tree house because the stilts put the windows on the leaf level of the abundant mature trees that grow around my home. The deliverymen were impressed by my nut collection. I saw greed in their eyes and offered them as many as they could take. They literally leaped at the offer and in addition to money they took bunches of coconuts home as a tip. I'm not sure which pleased them most.

I've seen people selling coconuts to Key West visitors, and they charge a pretty penny to give someone one of God's own coconuts with a straw stuck out the top. Here's a way to save a buck or two, and learn some self reliance as the housing market forces your food budget into the toilet (so to speak).

First, pop downstairs and pick up your machete, make sure its sharp and ready for work. Your curved Tibetan machete isn't much good for this kind of cutting as the point will hit the ground. To open coconuts you need the American traditional straight blade, and you might want to keep the blade sharp with a whetstone (the blue and white thing in the picture). Then collect your long handled tree trimmer, unless you fancy climbing the trees like people seen on National Geographic, and head for one of your very productive coconut trees. Remember coconuts are not native to the Keys, they were imported for food originally and now people grow them because they are what people expect to see in the (sub)tropics. They want coconuts, not scrubby thatch palms and the like, its what they expect to see on an exotic vacation. Palm trees are so called because the first European visitors to see them though they looked like human palms waving in the breeze. Very ethnocentric I'm sure. In the 19th century coconuts were farmed on plantations because they were the sheep of the plant world. From a coconut you could get oil, copra (the mat-like stuff that comes off from around the hard nut): And naturally the flesh of the nut itself:Here's where you start:

Put the nut on the ground bottom end to the side and start whacking the copra soft shell: Peel the outer skin off and then crack the hard inner nut. Hack a small hole in the hard shell and gently poke a hole with the tip of your machete:Put the opening to your mouth and drink. Repeat until the liquid gives you the runs.

I have tried catching it in a glass and adding rum and ice cubes but on the whole I like it best straight out of the nut. Then put the nut in your yard waste can and get it off to the dump as nuts go moldy and never seem to break down. Alternatively wait for a hurricane to blow by and let the flooding wash them all away. Dried copra makes an excellent barbeque fire, by the way, when the temperature drops below zero (70 fahrenheit).

Coconuts and fish may be a bland and tiresome diet but its what you eat when the cash runs out and you live in the fabulous Florida Keys. For all I know they do something similar in Minnesota too, but that would be another story.