So How Do You Open a Coconut?

My daughter loves fruit. If I'd let her (and some days I feel like I do) she'd live on fruit and crackers. With the occasional bowl of ice cream, of course.

Lately I've been trying to expand her tastes. She loves apples, grapes, pears, honeydew, bananas, strawberries, blueberries, plums -- and we get those fruits often. Some other fruits we don't get quite as frequently, but she still enjoys them, like kiwi. The other night at Wal-Mart we picked up some kiwi and then she noticed a stack of big, brown globes that almost looked like nuts. "What are those?" she asked.

"Coconuts," I answered.

"Can we get one?"

Well, I'm not a huge coconut fan, but I have to admit even I was curious enough to buy a whole coconut, especially when I realized it only cost a little over a dollar. And it said "Easy Open" right there on the packaging!

I even found a neat looking recipe in this month's "Your Big Backyard" magazine, one I still plan to make...if, that is, I can ever get the coconut open.

We tried this afternoon. S. was so excited, watching Mommy carefully read the directions. "Pierce the softest of the three eyes...then drain the water." Well, that was easy enough. Only one of the three dark spots on top was soft enough to actually puncture when I stabbed it with a knife. I spotted the bright white flesh of the coconut in the little hole, and we heard a satisfying sloshy sound. Then we had the fun of shaking the coconut over the sink until all the water came splashing out.

Great! Now for the final instruction. "Tap along groove." And then it said something about the coconut breaking open. Yep. It sure did say something like that.

And of course, nothing happened. I "tapped" along what looked like a dark groove (there was one going around the coconut horizontally as well as one that wrapped around vertically...I tried tapping along both, and also at their point of intersection). Well, at first I tried tapping -- with the knife. Then I tried tapping as in tapping an egg and trying to break it. And then I tried pounding the thing as hard as I could on my cutting board (little pieces of fuzzy brown hair from the outside shell went flying, but nothing else moved). By the time I'd resorted to pounding with the meat tenderizer (yes, I tried that too) the sweet girl had fled the room (not liking loud noises) and shut herself in her bedroom until it was all over.

I went to get her eventually. I managed to get out a tiny flake of coconut through the small hole on top, and she chewed it and said she liked it. The actual still unopened coconut is lying on my counter, waiting for me to come up with another creative way to attack it (or perhaps cowering in fear...can coconuts cower?).

I think my favorite moment in all of this was when S. said, oh so plaintively, "but you said it was easy to open!" To which I replied, "No, honey, the package said that. I just believed it."

Another practical lesson about truth in advertising...