We went to a small Caribbean island earlier this month. It’s called Vieques, and it’s technically a municipality of Puerto Rico, so therefore an American territory. It’s also where the U.S. Navy behaved like a bunch of total assholes for many decades, moving people off their land, testing bombs, running test seiges of family-packed beaches on Mother’s Day, and finally, leaving, but leaving thousands of acres still riddled with unexploded land mines.
Perhaps because of this, Vieques is still rather virgin. There are no massive resorts (one is coming, though, soon. But if there is an ugly part of the island, this resort found it. So there!), a couple of ATMs, two towns, a limited number of cars, and wild horses and chickens everywhere. Also, many beautiful, deserted beaches, with crystal clear, 80 degree turquoise water and not a building - or any real sign of civilization - to be seen for 10 or 20 miles.
Anyway, to further complicate our ugly American/utter bliss feelings was, of course, the food situation. We were warned that the only safe fish to eat was Caribbean lobster (scary! huge!), conch (slimy! only available in 10 pound bags!), and small, female red snapper (we didn’t find this at the dock). The other fish fed on an algae that made them unsafe for human consumption. One person told us if we were to be made sick from one of these fish, we could experience flu-like symptoms for three years. Needless to say, it was an entirely vegetarian week.
Which brings us to the coconuts (at least, we thought it would involve coconuts. You’ll see how it didn’t). The first photo (above) shows Ryan with the fruits of his wild foraging expedition. He got these three coconuts down from a tree by throwing an already downed coconut at them. And as if getting the down wasn’t hard enough, getting into them was even harder. Until we met Margo, but more on that later.
First, we tried removing the outer husk with a hammer and all of our appendages.
Once the fibrous, tough outer part was removed, we found what was recognizable to us as a coconut
But there didn’t seem to be any way to get into this newfound coconut. Until we found the drill.
But it’s hard to drill a sphere. And we were not successful. But later in the week, we moved from one house to another, and the woman who owned our new digs, Margo, taught us a couple of things about coconuts. First, you need a machete. She had quite a few. Next, while she was able to halve the coconut whose outer shell we’d removed, this was really the least efficient method of harvesting and processing coconuts. Oh, and the milk - the liquid at the heart of the coconut - wasn’t saved. Or worth saving. Look closely at this picture, and you can see the milk bursting out as she makes the decisive blow.
Here’s what it looks like when it’s opened. We took the meat out, packed it away, snuck it through the airport agricultural inspection, and made coconut sorbet. It was awesome.
