Coconut Adventure

After princess started reading "The Swiss Family Robinson" book, she asked questions about coconuts.

After home-school co-op today, my wife took her to the grocery store. There little princess asked my wife to buy a coconut because she thought it would taste great!

After they came home, we researched how to open a coconut (me on YouTube & my wife on the internet).

We started with using a screw driver and a hammer to the "eyes" of the coconut. Once the water was drained from the coconut, we tried to break it open with the back of a knife (not a meat cleaver as suggested by the YouTube videos and the internet). That did not work well, so we used a hammer to break the coconut in half. Here is where the fun begins...

The fun begins when you try and extract the coconut "meat," of course all the YouTube videos make it look so easy to extract! We first tried a spoon to scrape it out, then we tried a butter knife and spoon, then we tried a sharp knife, butter knife and spoon! One of the websites suggested we break the half shell into smaller pieces, then use a knife to pry the meat off. This works really well if you do not want to save the outer shell.

After about an hour of scraping the meat out, we were able to blend it up and strained the coconut milk with cheese cloth....the kids said they did not like the taste of the coconut milk. All was not lost though, we used the coconut milk to make shakes and the kids liked them. Here is a picture of the remaining coconut.