Food Preparation with Power Tools

My Friends,

   I hope the title conjured no visions of Sawzalls being used to chop carrots or belt sanders shredding lettuce; alas the truth is not that exciting.  I simply used a drill to put holes in a coconut.  Now I love coconuts but only buy them rarely because of the hassle associated with getting the milk and nut out of them.  Not so today, as I opened it at my place of employment wage slavery.  Now usually I open them at home where there is a dearth of tools (I have, in the past, resorted to using a 25lb dumbell to smash the coconut open).  It is a laborious process and as such I savour the reward.  However, in light of all the tools at work, I decided to get industrial on that bitch and pulled out the 18V cordless with a 1/4" bit (Insert that noise Tim Allen makes on" Tool Time"). 

   The results were pretty much what you'd expect: after two holes were drilled, the milk, the very nectar of this bounty of the tropics, literally flowed out into my glass.  I looked at it a moment then guzzled it down greedily.  This was in stark contrast to my aforementioned usual sipping and savouring, but then, the reward had come so easy so why not?  Despite my now-slaked thirst, a lingering feeling of emptiness and shame came over me.  I started thinking horrible thoughts about how bad I was with coconut milk-management and how my mom would be so disappointed if she witnessed the spectacle of my gluttony.  

   In a vain attempt to alleviate these feelings of woe I set to work on liberating the nut from the shell.  However, not being privy to the grand designs of the universe I was not aware that the powers that be, in their infinite wisdom, made the nut of this particular coconut particularly difficult to extricate from the shell, likely to offset the relative ease with which I extracted the milk.

   Now let me stop and ask a quick question: Do you remember the first time you actually thought to yourself about how your airbags would work in the event of a car accident?  How they would deploy in an explosive manner and that even if they saved your life they would exact their toll in facial damage?  I reasoned that using power tools to extract the nut was kind of like that: even if they worked they would not only destroy the coconut beyond edibility, but also sully it with saw dust and metal filings.  So I opted to wait until until the brilliant minds at DeWalt developed some kind of cordless coconut de-sheller and instead channelled my inner caveman and whacked the coconut on the floor.

   This was met with better-than-expected success as the nut broke clean into two halves, but there was still the persistent problem of separating the shell from the nut.  I reasoned that I could use my hands to collapse the coconut halves in an attempt to loosen some of the nut.  At first I doubted my ability to exert such a great amount of force then I recalled how years ago a WWF wrestler named "Crush" made his debut and his finishing move was crushing the opponent's head between his hands.  The announcer explained this move as being a result of his proficiency at crushing coconuts barehanded in his home state of Hawaii his whole life.  I reasoned that as fabricated as pro-wrestling may in fact be, they could not just blatantly lie about something like this: there had to be some basis in truth...there had to be!  

   Sure enough I did manage to crush the shell+nut into smaller and smaller pieces, but each new break availed me little in the high stakes game of separating coconut shell from nut.  Naturally, I gave up.  I considered me and the universe even for the relative ease with which I enjoyed the coconut milk and put the broken pieces onto a plate in the fridge to become my co-workers' problem.

Stay Thirsty

-Andre Guantanamo