Found food: coconuts

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Forecast: 97°/76°, sunny
Humidity:  74%
Sunrise 6:39 am., Sunset 6:24 p.m.

Well, we've hit the dry season, I guess!  The chance of rain today is down from August's 90% to 73%.  The humidity is down from August's 90% to 74%.  The temperature is up (rising from high 80's to high 90's).  Welcome to summer in Panama!

When I first got to Panama, I had a bunch of found-food adventures:  nísperos (loquats), guanábanas, "pipas" (immature coconuts) and platanos.  I'm no longer walking through the bit of a forest that had been my shortcut, and also we have emerged from the middle of the rainy season, and that meant that loquats and guanábanas are gone and I don't visit platanos and coconut trees as regularly.  

My AirBnB host has banana and starfruit trees growing in his back yard, so I do get to eat local in that sense, but the closest I've come to "found food" is a tree on our evening walk that has some kind of citrus-y fruit that drops to the ground; I tried it, but can't identify it and am not overly taken with it.

But then, when we visited the islands around Coiba, I discovered another found-food aficionado!

The island where we had lunch.
My companion in culinary collection was none other than Mr. Adventure, who wandered the beach and came back to us with a coconut.  


When I'd tried opening the "pipa" on my own, I'd used a big kitchen knife; most pros use a machete, but I didn't happen to have one of those lying around, you know.  The kitchen knife was not ideal, but eventually I got it to work.  

How do you open up a coconut on a beach when the "tools" you brought with you are snorkeling and scuba gear?  It turns out that nature herself provides the tool: what army calls a "BFR" (short for Big Something Rock).
Smash!  Smash! Smash!

When you smash of the outer layer of the coconut, what you see is . . . a coconut.  I did not know that--that there are multiple layers.  That might be why I had so much trouble with the second pipa I brought home and tried to open, only to find a hard inner layer that I just tossed.

Mr. Adventure demonstrates 
the coconut within the coconut.

Fortunately, coconut are not like onions or Russian dolls; they're not coconuts all the way down. The second application of the BFR opened this smaller coconut up, and inside was the milk, the hard coconut layer that I know best, and an inside thing that is also coconut-tasting and somewhat yummy, which I was told is the "embryo".  

A close-up of the opened coconut. 

Actually, Mr. Adventure opened two coconuts for me, because I was so incredibly taken with seeing him do the found-food thing on the first one, so he demonstrated in slow-mo again while I took pictures and asked questions.  The second coconut was a bit riper, and the embryo on that one was pale white. 
A second coconut, revealed.

And that's my latest, very happy, found food experience!


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