Chicken skewers, aka, Chicken Satay! Coconut milk makes a great marinade for chicken, making it tender and juicy even when grilled.
I’d also use some of it to make my Tanzanian Spinach Peanut Curry, which just happens to go fabulously with Chicken Satay. (When I make the curry, I don’t bother with a separate dipping sauce for the chicken. We just dip it in the Peanut Curry sauce.)
You could try non-alcoholic cheap coquito. Since I don’t have authentic coconut milk, I usually do 1 can of coconut milk, one can of evaporated milk, and one can condensated milk. Blend them together, add cinnamon to taste. Yummy…
This needs to be stressed. The watery stuff inside the coconut is NOT coconut milk, and if you try to make just about every recipe mentioned in this thread so far with it, it’s going to turn out watery and not very coconut-y.
Coconut milk, as called for in any recipe out there, is made by soaking fresh coconut meat in a little bit of water, then squeezing out the resulting thick liquid. It’s much thicker and stronger tasting than the stuff inside the coconut.
Coconut water - the stuff inside the coconut - is tasty and can be drunk as-is, or mixed with juice for a coconut-y drink. But it’s not used for much else besides that.
The OP says they “made coconut milk out of the innards”. That seems pretty clear that they expended some effort changing the innards into something else, not just tapped and poured. I think we can assume the vocabulary is correct.
One of the most recent food chats on the Washington Post had a link to a grilled corn recipe - one of the writers there called it the best corn she’d ever had.
Basically, you cook coconut milk with some brown sugar, a bay leaf, and a pinch of salt, then baste corn with the mixture several times as it’s cooking, and then again when you pull it off the grill.
I vote for this.
I like to use palm sugar as the sweetener and a good squeeze of lime juice to stop it being too cloying.
I have been known to eat this for breakfast.