I got a recipe box for Christmas with brand new recipe cards and I took some time during a rainy day to start filling it/copy down the recipes in my grandmother’s old recipe box.

Before I continue I need to make one thing very clear…I’m not a cook. I’m not a baker. I’ve only made food three times for my friends total…and that was mostly because of guilt for always bringing cheese plates or fruit trays to parties. I’ve helped my friends cook, but I need them to walk me through every step. I didn’t even know how to properly cut up a bell pepper (apparently there’s a specific way to do it?!).

Now, continuing the story:

While I was working on my…30th card the word coconut had been coming up a lot. Now some of these cards I was copying from are OLD. I mean 40+ years old. Anyways, I noticed coconut occasionally was spelled cocoAnut.

This got my stupid brain thinking, a dangerous thing to happen. I called my mom and asked her, “Do they call coconuts, coconuts because when they discovered them, people thought they were like cocoa beans, but clearly a nut so they called them cocoanuts?”

She paused. Sighed, you know the sigh. It’s the Am I really having this conversation right now? sigh. Then she answered, not very enthusiastically I might add, “I don’t know. I wasn’t there when they decided that.”

Fair. But then why do people constantly misspell it cocoanut?

And before any of you get smart with me and try to explain the linguistics mumbo-jumbo, realize it won’t work. I’ve created this version of history in my head where the first explorers or whoever found a palm tree and thought “Wow! Look at the size of that cocoa bean! We could make sooooo much chocolate out of that sucker!” Then when they cracked it open to see the white coconut flesh inside and got soaked from the coconut milk they deflated and were really disappointed and sad. I mean could you imagine a cocoa bean the size of a coconut? That would be the best chocolate ever…