A Handy Guide to Valentine's Day in Holtville

WORDS BY ELIZABETH ENRIQUEZ-PHILLIPS

   Ah, Valentine's Day is in the air tomorrow, but wait what do I get my sweetheart? Well if you are like me you love to shop local! Here's a Valentine's Day Guide for Holtville:

Photo from Marisol's Holtville Floral & Gifts

Flowers

   Recently I was volunteering my time with the Chamber of Commerce and got to experience first-hand the amazing fresh quality of Marisol's Holtville Floral & Gifts at 571 Pine Avenue.She currently has roses, balloons and stuffed animals for the special person in your life. You will not be disappointed!

Sweets

   Lovely's Luscious Cupcakes of Holtville is AMAZING! Luke tried the Elvis Cupcake and loved it. One on my list to try is the Moscato cupcakes...hope I can get an order soon. This cupcake is perfect for any occasion that calls for a bubbly drink.  If you can get them for Valentine's, for sure place an order soon. They make a mean cupcake.

Moscato Cupcakes from Lovely's Luscious Cupcakes

Stationary

   Our local Parker's Pharmacy has a good selection of  conventional cards. They also carry See's Candies.
They are located at 102 West 5th street.

   Another great selection of really cool cards is I Heart Kid by Minerva Torres, a local artist. She currently has two cards to choose from and both are delightful.

Fine Wine & Dining

   The Fields Steakhouse at the
 Barbara Worth Resort. Mmmm... what can I say about Fields. It's absolutely delicious! Chef Chris is super talented and brings his experience from working at fine venues such as the Hotel del Coronado. I personally loves how he creates a fusion of classic cuisine and combines them with our local palette.  They are currently having a special on a four-course meal for $28.95 per person. Sounds of Jazz will also be playing as you enjoy your baby greens salad with dried cherries, cotijia cheese and a sherry vinaigrette.The appetizer is garlic shrimp with black bean puree, cornbread and pico de gallo. The main course is a choice between grilled filet mignon or a grilled lobster tail. If you are a big eater you can have both entrees for an extra ten dollars. Both entrees comes with a baked potato and baby carrots as well as a complimentary glass of champagne. Desert is a lovely Creme Brulee, which is my favorite. Join the event on Facebook and call for a  reservation, but hurry they are filling up fast.

An intimate setting at Fields Steakhouse

Casual Dining

   Nana's Cafe is also having a Valentine's Day special. We have gone the past two years and it's quite good and affordable. Please call them for reservation and details.

  Hot Rods and Beer is having a Valentine's Day Special too, and it includes a bottle of wine and a rose. They have Clark Baker's Standing Room Only performing. Call for details.

Beautiful Holt Park

Family Fun

   Have the little ones afoot and need to entertain them as well? May I suggest a family picnic at Holt Park! Holt Park is one of the most well kept and nicest park in the Valley and it's quite romantic as well!

Here's to all of you. May you have a truly happy Valentine's Day!

Helen Wilson: Holtville's Walking Lost and Found

WORDS & PHOTO BY LUKE PHILLIPS

   If you've lost anything in Holtville in the past couple of decades, there's a pretty good chance that Pine Avenue resident Helen Wilson might have found it.

Helen Wilson

   For the past 22 years (since 1990) Wilson has been walking the streets of Holtville every morning, up to eight miles a day, and almost every time she leaves the house she finds something of value. Cash, cell phones, jewelry, keys, knives, blank checks, $100 bills, wedding rings and just about anything else you can imagine too. Anything valuable that she find in Holt Park she turns in to City Hall and the rest goes to the Sheriff's Office. Except for small amounts of change which she keeps.

   A couple of years ago Helen decided to save all of the cash that she found for a one-year period, from January 2011 to January 2012. At the end of the year, she had found $140 mostly in coins, but a couple of larger bills as well.

   "I find money almost every day," she said. "People don't look for money, but it's there. I've found a lot on Holt Ave."

   Helen says she finds the most coins just after dawn when they tend to shine in the bright morning light, especially on mornings when the street cleaner is running.

   "The street cleaner can't pick the coins up so it just cleans it and spits it out and I walk along and pick it up," she said with a laugh.

   She also once found two $20 bills in the same day independent of one another, one on the sidewalk and another several blocks away in a gutter.

   Wilson can be seen walking the streets of Holtville nearly every morning, her gaze turned downward as her eyes search the sidewalks, gutters and streets for whatever they might find. She says she learned the habit of looking things when she was a young girl and her father would take her to the desert to search for screws and other scrap metal. From that point on, she's been finding all types of different things.

   And it's not just money and valuables that Wilson finds either. She says she routinely removes nails and other debris from the streets of Holtville and also uses a stick with a poker to pick up trash when she finds it. She's also turned in lost dogs and cats and even removes the bodies of animals that have been hit by cars.

   "I don't want to let people just keep running over them and running over them. I hate that," she said.

    And once when a pet owner wouldn't let her remove the body of their dead dog, she stood in the street and guarded the body until the police arrived.

   "I just said I'll be damned if I'm going to let anyone run over that dog again," she said.

   Helen is so good and finding things that her friends and co-workers often recruit her to look for their own missing items. She works at the Finley Elementary cafeteria where she once found her boss, Isabel Jesse's lost diamond earring and also once found co-worker Kimmy Lee's lost antique ring pressed into one of the cafeteria's rubber floor mats.

   She's also found her own lost items. Once when she arrived home from a walk, Helen realized that her earring was missing. She began to re-trace her steps and found the earring on the sidewalk after walking about a block.

   Helen says her main hobby now is hunting for interesting rocks and old railroad spikes in the empty lots on Fourth Street where the old railroad line used to run through Holtville which she uses to make wind chimes.
 

Pancho Villa Salad: Re-Creating a Holtville Cafeteria Classic

WORDS AND PHOTOS BY LUKE PHILLIPS

   Since I was a small child one of my favorite foods in the entire world has been a dish that many Holtvillites are probably familiar with: The Pancho Villa Salad served at Holtville school cafeterias.

   My mom has been the cook at the school district's kitchen for the past 16 years and she says that Pancho is by far the most popular dish served at the cafeteria. She says that people who have graduated and gone away to college have come back to the cafeteria just to eat Pancho again. People also ask her how to make it all the time, so I thought I'd share the recipe. I've made it a few times at home and I've been able to replicate the cafeteria version pretty closely.

   The dish is fairly simple, consisting of seasoned ground beef served over corn chips and topped with shredded lettuce and cheese, but in order to make it taste like the version served at the cafeteria a few key elements must be in place.

   Start by taking a couple of pounds of ground beef and smooshing it up with your hands so it has a smoother consistancy. You want the finished product to be fairly thin and saucy so it will spread onto the chips properly. This step is important and is overlooked by many attempting to replicate the recipe.

   Brown the beef, making sure to chop up any remaining lumps with a wooden spoon, drain the fat, then add a can of tomato paste, a cup of water and at least two tablespoons of red chile powder (I like mine spicy, so I usually add a little more chile powder, around 4 or 5 tablespoons.). You can use the California or the New Mexico style chile powder, but I recommend the California style for this recipe. You also want to add a few tablespoons of dehydrated onions, another ingredient that is essential for getting the flavor right, but is sometimes overlooked. Continue to simmer the meat over low to medium heat for another 10-15 minutes.

   Spread a couple handfuls of white tortilla chips (I like the Mission brand ones) on a plate and top with the meat sauce, shredded chedder cheese and finely-chopped iceburg lettuce. And that's all there is to it!

   There are tons of possible variations to this recipe, adding salsa, jalapenos, sour cream, etc., but I really like it without anything else added, just the way Holtville schools have been serving it for more than 30 years.

Haunted Holtville: The Scariest House in Town?

WORDS BY LUKE PHILLIPS

   When I was in my early twenties my family moved from our home of 17 years on Kamm Rd., about a half-mile outside of Holtville, to a new home on the edge of town.

   Across the street and slightly to the east of our new home was an older house surrounded by a fence made of railroad ties driven into the ground. Time had taken a toll on the wooden beams and the entire fence leaned slightly inward toward the house, giving it a very guarded feeling from the outside. The place gave off a weird vibe right from the get-go, but at that point we had no idea just how strange the place truly was.

    The house was empty when we moved into the neighborhood and remained that way for some time. A couple of different people moved into the house, but no one stayed for long. They mostly waited until their six-month lease was up and quickly moved out. One of those people later became a family friend and shared some truly creepy stories about their stay in the house, but they don't want to be identified in this story, so we'll just call her Mrs. Smith.

   Mrs. Smith moved into the house with her family and quickly discovered that it was not a fun place to live. She reported feeling something or someone sit down on the edge of her bed at night when she knew no one was there. She experienced strange sounds and touches. And most disturbing of all, she was once pinned to her bed by an unseen force, unable to move and heard a voice whisper in her ear "Tell them I love them."

   I had moved away and was living in Arizona when all this happened, but as soon as I moved back to Holtville in 2009 I had my own experience involving the house, the only experience that I've had in my life that I'm absolutely sure was supernatural.

   My wife Liz (then my fiancé) and I were looking for a place in town to rent and momentarily considered the creepy old house across from my parents. Keep in mind that this was before we heard the ghost stories from the previous tenants. We called the number on the rental sign out front and strangely enough, the realtor told us that they didn't know anything about the house and that they didn't even handle any homes in Holtville. We tried for about two weeks to find the actually management company or individual that was renting the house, but to no avail. It kind of felt like the house didn't want to be rented. As strange as that sounds, that's the feeling we both got.

   Since we couldn't find anybody to show us the house, and we knew it was empty at the time, we went over by ourselves one evening to have a look around the outside. The house seemed to be oddly laid-out and constructed and we discovered that there's actually a hidden garage door built into the side of the house. As we made our way around one particularly dark corner of the house, Liz and I both started feeling light-headed and dizzy and very, very unwelcome. We got out of there and decided we didn't want to rent the place after all.

   A few days later Liz and I were sitting in front of the fence of my parents' front lawn late at night, not far from the house across the street. We heard rustling sounds in the yard behind the railroad tie fence, coming from the same corner of the property that had given us the willies a few days earlier. My first thought was that a small animal of some sort was scuffling around, but then we heard a door slam loudly and an angry old woman's voice distinctly yell: "Get outta there!" Then in a split second everything fell silent.

   You might say what we heard could have been anything or anyone, and you may be right, but I'm certain enough in my own head that what we heard was a ghost.

   I knew I wanted to write a story about a haunted house in Holtville for Halloween this year and this was the only one I could think of, but I’m sure there are plenty more. Have you experienced a haunting or any other ghostly activity here in the Carrot Capital? Tell us about it in the comments section below!