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🤔Is it possible to love croquetas too much?
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🤔Is it possible to love croquetas too much?

The only thing we might love more than croquetas are the Atlantic Ocean sunrises.

PAPAYA OOH-NA-NA

This month we’re highlighting four exotic fruits you can find all over Miami and sharing tips on how to eat them.

Here are the deets on our first fruit, the guanábana. Today we’re filling you in on the papaya, aka papaw.

It’s a little weird looking, but some consider it a superfood because it’s packed with vitamin C and it can help with reducing swelling. Here are some lesser known facts about this fruit we’re lucky to find all over the 305:

WHERE IT COMES FROM: The fruit made its journey to Miami from Mexico and South America, but grows in subtropic climates and can be found everywhere from the Sunshine State to California and in places like Indonesia and Thailand.

WHERE TO FIND IT IN THE 305: Thankfully we didn’t have to travel across any oceans to get one. We just went down to the Robert is Here fruit stand in Homestead. You can also find them at most grocery stores.

WHAT IT TASTES LIKE: Papaya kinda tastes like a melon, but not as sweet. Plus, did you know you can eat the seeds? (Just a few, not all at once!) They’re a little spicy (like black pepper) and are sometimes ground up to be used as spices in curries.

FUN FACT: The plant that grows the papaya can be male, female or have organs from both genders. And actually, the plants often pollinate themselves.

HOW TO EAT IT:  Slice it up and pair it with your morning pancakes. Don’t love the smell? Squeeze a wedge of lime on it. For more tips on how to prepare all kinds of papaya-based treats, check out this piece from Miami Herald food writer Linda Bladholm.

Share the papaya love by offering up your own delicious or creative ways of enjoying this fruit on our video.

MADE POSSIBLE BY BAPTIST HEALTH SOUTH FLORIDA

WHAT’S NEW IN THE 305

All aboard! Miami-Dade County says that high-speed rail Brightline will “hopefully” be in Miami by May – but not before the county does some serious local education about staying off the tracks and not trying to outrun the train. Six people have been killed by Brightline trains since service launched in South Florida, four of them because they thought they could get across before the train came through. (Miami Herald)

And it begins. Everyone’s been waiting for some of the several Democratic candidates running for Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen’s congressional seat to drop out, especially after Florida passed a law requiring that anyone running for Congress must give up their local or state office. That raised the stakes of staying in the race until the primary for several candidates. (Plus, Democratic Party bigwig Donna Shalala entered the race and immediately raised a ton of money.) Welp, it’s happening. Both City of Miami Commissioner Ken Russell and State Rep. Jose Javier Rodriguez have dropped out, meaning they’ll keep their current seats. Meanwhile, Miami Beach Commissioner Kristen Rosen-Gonzalez, another candidate, is suing because she doesn’t think she should have to give up her seat. (Miami Herald)

Making history. The wave of development sweeping through historically black West Coconut Grove is taking its toll on the neighborhood’s iconic shotgun houses, an architectural style the original residents brought over from the Bahamas. Those homes have become one of the area’s most distinctive features. Now the City of Miami is asking for about 50 of them to be declared part of a historic collection so they can’t be knocked down. (Miami Herald)

Gray area. Federal authorities shut down the notorious Backpage.com earlier this week as part of a crackdown on sites that assist with prostitution, and that has serious implications for South Florida – a hub of human trafficking. While some are celebrating the move as a law enforcement victory, anti-sex trafficking activists say it could actually make the sex industry a more dangerous place by pushing it even further underground. Police officers often used the site to find trafficking victims. (Miami Herald)

Bad news bears. According to a new report, the amount of venture capital – investments coming from people with a whole lot of money willing to invest in riskier startups – dipped by 9 percent every quarter last year. And if you cut virtual reality startup Magic Leap out of the picture, well, it’s not pretty. In the last quarter of 2017 and the first quarter of 2018, 90 percent of venture capital funds “deployed” to South Florida went to Magic Leap. (SFBJ)

Cash money. Miami may have a rep for a burgeoning, exciting art scene, but it is a STRUGGLE to succeed as a local artist here. It’s getting a little easier with the launch of the Ellies. The new ArtCenter/South Florida program will award $500,000 a year to Miami-based artists to take off a little bit of the financial pressure so they can focus on creating and upping their game. (Miami Herald)

Bad math. The Miami Marlins posted the worst regular season MLB attendance record in a decade at Monday night’s game, with only 7,003 people in attendance. Then they broke that record the next night, with only 6,516 fans in the stands. But hold up. At the start of the season, the new owners said they would be ending previous owner Jeffrey Loria’s various little tricks for inflating attendance numbers, so no one really knows how this week’s attendance compares to games in past seasons. (Miami New Times)

Oops. In yesterday’s newsletter, we included a story from the Miami Herald about Palmetto Bay buying up land from a developer to prevent a school from being built… but we included a broken link. Sorry about that. Here’s the right link.

THAT’S ALL FOR TODAY.

We’ll catch you mañana.

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