Avocado and Coconut Cream

After turning a pudding into a porridge yesterday, I found that I had an open can of coconut milk...and no refrigerator.

Fortunately, I had a perfectly ripe avocado, and had already discovered that a sour-bitter fatty fruit that I don't usually like to eat on its own, and another sour-bitter fatty fruit that I don't usually like to eat on its own, can combine to make something that I actually quite enjoy.

With sugar. Lots of sugar. Okay, not lots, actually but...some.

"Sour" and "bitter" aren't quite the words for what I don't like about these fruits, though. There's something...carbonated about the flavor, and not in a good fizzy drinks sort of way. There's a taste similar to how the exhaust pipe of a car smells, that sort of carbon, that I guess I'm just sensitive to.

When that can be counteracted or covered up by other ingredients, though, avocado has a great texture and versatile subtle and slightly sweet flavor, and coconut just has that sweet sort of groundedness that I was surprised to find present in a lot of my favorite snacks: suman, bibingka, and almost every kind of puto. I say that this is surprising because I'm usually averse to coconut on principle.

I actually skimmed the top of the coconut milk with my spoon, and coconut cream itself really isn't half bad.

Then I made the mistake of stirring it, to get the translucent juice up from where it'd settled below the cream and--URGH yes there it is, that's what flavors it badly.

Strangely, I'm in a mood to drink coconut juice or coconut water sometimes and have no problem with that particular aspect of the flavor when it's kept low-key, maybe by the freshness of the juice or something?



There's a new diet fad going around called the Paleo diet that makes a staple food out of coconut, because that's what Cave People ate or something and they were healthier (supposed to be) than modern humans for all our modern conveniences. It's likely that people on a Paleo diet know and care more about the nutritional value of coconut than I could, because I just get it for the flavor, which I sometimes (or some aspects of which) I just don't like.

Avocado has more potassium than a banana, Vitamin K which is needed for blood clotting, several kinds of B-vitamins, Vitamin C, and Vitamin E. I have fewer recipes for that, although I'm generally more tolerant of avocado's carbon-y sort of taste for some reason, even though this fruit is usually more up-front about that aspect. The same smokiness in coconut tends to be sneakier.