Camacho Watcho

I know, I know…I tend to fall in love with food quickly and easily. Recently my love affairs have been with these cherries, this soup, this bacon, these momos and these tacos…what can I say? I’m a romantic!

But never fear, there is room in my heart to fall in love all over again with a particular sandwich. Layers of thinly sliced steak, ham, cheese, egg, roasted red peppers, olives, pickles…and the list goes on and on…piled high on a fresh deli roll. Oh. My. God.

The chivito originated in Uruguay, which is where I first experienced one and fell in love. I made it my personal quest to find the best chivito in all of Montevideo (the capital of Uruguay) and at my best (or worst, some my say), I ate 4 chivitos in one weekend. Hey! It was all in the name of research! I determined that the best chivito, which is also preferred by locals, is at Chivitos Marcos, a chivito chain found throughout towns in Uruguay. I wrote about my chivito eating here and here, and if pictures can say a thousand words, I don’t think I need to speak again.

But don’t just take my word for it…listen to Anthony Bourdain. He and his brother Chris visited Uruguay last February (sadly, only 1 1/2 months after I left) and they also tried the chivito…at Chivitos Marcos. It is safe to say that the chivito blew the grungy socks off of Anthony Bourdain.

So last night we decided to create the mighty chivito ourselves…but instead of locally sourced from Uruguay, we went locally sourced from Minnesota. With very few exceptions (mustard, pickles (WI), and olive oil to make the mayo (Italy, where else), all our ingredients were from local farms. It was a double challenge, and I will say that we rose to the occasion. We even made the mayo ourselves, used roasted red peppers that I had bought last summer at the farmers market and preserved, and bought all the meat, eggs, and bread locally. All this local goodness went into our sandwiches, which were even better than I had remembered. A side of homemade sweet potato fries and I do believe we all were in heaven.

So, as I said…I’m in love with a sandwich. And now you can understand why.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 26th, 2009 at 11:24 am and is filed under Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.