Good Coconut Gone Bad

On Sunday we bought a fresh coconut at the international grocery store. A couple days later, I decided to cut it up to make coconut milk for the thai stirfry I was making. (Coconut milk, I learned, is not the juice or "water" that comes out, but it's made by soaking the actual coconut meat in water.)

It required some googling to figure out to even get this thing open....

A coconut has three "eyes," one of which will be softer. This should have been my first clue, though:  the eyes should not look like they're open at all.

There are a few tools required for this. I used a hammer and what I'm going to call a black awl thingy, which I'm sure is the proper name for it....

A few good taps, and the eye opened up and i poured out the coconut water.

It looked nice to me, but after doing more research I discovered that actually coconut water should be like, well, water. Not thick and definitely no bits of slime!

I was going to go at this thing some more with the hammer, but Jason got home and had a different method, which I don't exactly recommend as safer (even if I am the girl who broke her foot by tripping).

But it worked, and we got fresh coconut! Except...it smelled disgusting. And the flesh, although white, was soft and kinda mushy. Ewww. I thought maybe it was like durian or some other fruit that was just supposed to be a little smelly, but after more googling decided that couldn't be right. To all the people on message boards who say they've cut up hundreds with only a few rotten ones: I envy you!

Just to be sure, I took a tiny taste of the coconut meat. Definitely rancid. I had to rinse my mouth out for a while after that one. :-P

Fortunately, I had backup for the coconut milk idea:

And the stirfry turned out fine. (I made this thai stirfry, but without mushrooms or fish sauce.) Now I just need to figure out how to make stirfry more filling.

 the end.