Fred is a coconut who arrived at our house earlier in the week. While grocery shopping, my daughter MG, saw a blonde coconut at the market and asked if we could PLEASE buy it. “OK,” I said. Of course, strategically placed next to the coconut display was a clip displaying a devise to open coconuts. It was called a “Young Coconut Punch” and was designed to cut a small hole into a young coconut. The picture on the package showed a green-colored coconut; ours was not green but blonde, but it was a coconut. So the coconut and the Young Coconut Punch came home with us. And the coconut sat on the kitchen counter for a couple of days until MG asked, “Mom, can I open the coconut?” So we began to open the coconut.

First, we took the Young Coconut Punch from its packaging, glanced quickly at the pictorial instructions, swaddled the coconut in a towel and placed our swaddled coconut in a small bowl to keep it from rolling around on the counter. Then we positioned the Young Coconut Punch over one of the “eyes” of the coconut and proceeded to “screw” the punch down into the eye to open a hole; we were not successful.

What we needed was a hammer to drive the sharp end of the Young Coconut Punch down into the eye of the coconut. So we hammered; we were not successful.

Next, we went online. We found out that our coconut was not a “green” or “young” coconut at all. Ours was really a brown coconut; the reason it was blonde was because it hadn’t aged. So we researched how to open a brown coconut and learned a few things. We learned that coconuts not only have eyes (they have two of them), they also have a nose and a mouth! The eyes are hard, but the mouth is soft. It is the mouth that we want to poke into when we open the coconut.

So, armed with our new knowledge and a hammer and a newly cleaned screwdriver, we proceeded to poke a hole in the mouth of the coconut. It worked! We then drained the coconut water out.

Now we needed to crack the coconut to harvest the meat. The instructions said to wack the coconut around its equator using the back or blunt side of a chef’s knife: rotating the coconut and wacking til a crack appears. Again, it worked! Turn and wack, turn and wack…until we had two separate hemispheres of coconut.

Picking the meat out was a slow process: pry the meat away from the shell and scoop it out in chunks. After completing this job, we had two clean coconut “cups”.
“Cool!” we observed.
“We could use them as bowls.”
“Or as cups!”
“No, it has a hole in the bottom.”
“Well, if you held your finger over the hole, you could use it as a cup.”
“We could use it as a mailbox and send messages back and forth to one another inside.”
“Cool!”
“Let’s give it a name.”
“How about “Fred”?”
Hence our coconut named Fred.