When I was a kid living in Ft Lauderdale and Miami, we had graceful, sweeping coconut palms on the beach. They were the palms of South Pacific and Gilligan’s Island — exotic, beautiful, and always ready to brain someone walking underneath.
Unfortunately, the coconut palms in South Florida and the Keys got hit with a blight in the 70s, and they all died out. These days, another variety of coconut palm grows in Florida, blight-resistant and just as bountiful, but they are short, squat trees that grow straight up with no arc or sweeping curve.
The last couple years I lived in Atlanta, I knew I’d move back to Florida some day, and there were two things I wanted: a fishing boat, and a coconut palm.
I got the fishing boat fairly quickly, but the first place I lived had no coconut palm. A coconut did wash up under my dock after a storm, so I planted it for fun (it may take a year for one to sprout), but it never grew. These days, we live in a house with two coconut palms in our yard, (the boat is another story — my first got swamped and destroyed by Hurricane Jeanne, and I’m currently rebuilding a project boat for fun).
We live at the northern limit for coconut palm growth. They won’t take a freeze, or even a frost, and our trees probably wouldn’t survive inland a couple miles. It takes a palm just about a year to mature a coconut, which seems like a long time, except that the palm will flower and grow another cluster about once a month, so there’s always a rotating bounty of nuts. When we first moved a little over a year ago, there were no nuts on the tree, someone had cleared them off. So now, we are harvesting our first ripe coconuts since we’ve moved in.
The coconut milk found in cans, commonly used in curries, comes from a process of extracting the liquid fat from the coconut meat found inside. I’ve always wanted to try to do this, and with a bunch of harvested nuts, I figured I’d give it a try.
I made a green curry chicken with sprouts, mushrooms, bamboo shoots, garlic, and scallions, and served it over pad thai noodles.
Sing along!