Natural Coconut Chips

Coconut chips like these are larger than your average flakes and right-sized for eating out of hand, as a healthy, tasty, naturally sweet snack.

It's a wonder anyone ever decided to crack open a coconut to see what was inside, but we sure are glad it happened. The fruits of a palm tree been around since prehistoric times and are thought to have survived because they are utterly unsinkable-just imagine all those coconuts bobbing their way to survival, and then self-cultivating once they washed ashore on the islands off the South Pacific and Indian Ocean. It wouldn't be until the 15th century before the Portuguese explorers en route to the New World called them "coco," or merry monkey, which is a pretty apt description of the way the hairy husk looks with those three dimples on its "face."

You'll be grinning, too, when eating these coconut chips, which are about as close as you can come to cracking scraping a just-cracked coconut into chips yourself, but why do the heavy lifting when you can just dig right in? Fine as is, the chips are also terrific when toasted in the oven until lightly browned, tossing once or twice.