Crazy Coconut Night

I finally participated in Bountiful Baskets! It was awesome to see all the produce we got and it's great quality. As you can see below we got grapes, cantaloupe, bananas, nectarines, apples, AND.... three coconuts! We also got beans, tomatoes, celery, lettuce, potatoes, and broccoli. So yummy! Well.... what do you do with coconuts?
Well apparently they only last a week so we both jumped online to find different things we could do with them. We first punched holes in them to drain the coconut water.

Then we went outside to act like monkeys and crack these things open

It was surprisingly easier than I thought it would be to crack it open.

Levi even liked playing with them!

We tried to peel the "coconut meat" off the shell but that we just too hard. We tried a theory that if you bake it (or freeze it) just a bit before hand, the meat will come off easier.... that was a lie. So I asked Rick to go outside with his hammer and smash it to smithereens for me. Then I can rinse them and take each little piece and grate them with a cheese grater.

Which worked perfectly by the way.

We ended up drying most of it (200 degrees for 90 minutes on a baking sheet) and some of the fresh shredded coconut I made into cookies. Not really cookies. It was whipped egg whites with honey and a pinch of salt. I'm not eating sweets for 2 1/2 more weeks so that is why I made that recipe. They turned out more like chewy lumps of coconut, but it was still good. Rick is going to use the coconut water and make it into a cream sauce for chicken. He also used some of the coconut to blend up with pineapple juice and milk to make some weird version of a virgin pina colada. All and all it was a fun night. Way too much coconut for one day though. I dreamed of coconut last night.