My local produce department is top notch, but nothing beats reaching up and grabbing fresh fruit from a tree. Quanapes, sea grapes, passion fruit, breadfruit, mangoes, coconuts… all were within easy reach during our recent trip to Puerto Rico and Vieques. Landing back in reality includes accepting the seasonality and limited availability of passion fruit here in central Ohio.
Coconuts, on the other hand, have achieved mainstream non-exotic status in US groceries. Grabbing one from a store display seems a bit tame, though, after watching them prepared roadside near El Yunque National Forest. A big knife, a stump and a few heavy swings was all it took to split one open for Matt. A few sips of the watery “milk”, though, and he was ready to move on to the fleshy fruit.
Later in the trip, we watched a man split a coconut with no tools at all, hurling it at the ground repeatedly until it fractured enough to be pried apart. He insisted on giving us the opened coconut and split off pieces of the outer husk to make scooping spoons. Of course, we couldn’t resist trying to split our own then, tossing coconuts at boulders throughout the rest of our trip. They take a bit more effort than peeling a quanape or plucking a sea grape, but the exercise of opening a coconut only adds to the enjoyment of eating one. I bet they taste even better when you climb the tree to grab your own!
Updated from August 23, 2010.
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