It has been a fun week over here at the Fruit Maven house including everything from ballet (not me) to a new type of ‘therapy’ with coconuts and hammers (me).  Tomorrow the week will be topped off with a trip to meet a local Thai food and coconut expert, Su-Mei Yu, author of Cracking the Coconut: Classic Thai Home Cooking. Su-Mei is a long time friend of  Specialty Produce, a company I have been working with for the last few months on a few small projects.

(Sidenote to say that their produce app is a spectacular resource for when you are perusing the farmer’s market and have a question or for when you have an unusual ingredient and need a recipe. Check it out – it’s FREE. Iphone and Android)

So this week’s project had me looking in to a few types of coconut. Prior to this, I didn’t even know there was more than one kind. I would just dive in like I normally do and tell you about it, but since I am meeting the expert tomorrow I suppose I should wait until I have that information.

I couldn’t wait to start playing with the actual coconuts though — so of course I had a hammer and chef’s knife out in my backyard fruitlessly hacking away prior to reading any of the information so widely available to me.  Ok, well that’s not quite true. I had read the super easy instructions that Su-Mei provides in her book to drain the juice by piercing two of the eyes and then cook the whole coconut for 20 minutes at 375 degrees before trying to hammer it. I guess I just felt it didn’t apply to me.

So there I was, in the backyard with a hammer slamming away at this rock of a fruit. It just bounced there un-phased. Over and over. Um…right. So I guess I’ll turn on the oven. Spectacularly I somehow ended up de-husking one of them whole after following the instructions, which made me feel like I’d won some sort of lottery. Surely that is auspicious in some culture. I’m assuming some spectacular things are headed my way even as I type…

Stay tuned next week for a few posts on comparing coconut juice, types of husked coconuts and the ever so weird and delightful young coconut (the flesh is like jelly noodles.)