Happy New Year. I hope you had a wonderful holiday season and are ready to begin another new year. To get things started right I thought I would share another breakfast recipe with you. Because, if breakfast is the most important meal of the day, then it must be at least equally so for the first breakfast of the New Year.

I know some people like to eat foods that will bring them luck in the New Year; black eyed peas, marzipan pigs, and my personal favorite, pickled herring. Yes, that’s right pickled herring. Now, I am not one to turn away foods, but this is one point where I might make an exception. I can clearly remember my grandmother plucking a slimy silver chunk of fish from a bowl at the stroke of midnight, tilting her head back and swallowing. Well, she most likely used a fork and a small plate, but in my childhood memories, she used her fingers and swallowed those suckers whole. I have no idea if she liked pickled herring, but I do know that she liked disgusting her granddaughters with them.

Apparently my grandmothers’ family believed that eating pickled herring at midnight on New Year’s Eve would bring good luck and good fortune in the coming year. And it would be just like her to make sure she ate one every year at midnight whether she wanted to or not. It was the proper thing to do. Since my grandmother passed away no one has even mentioned procuring a jar of pickled herring, and I don’t think anyone misses the smell.

For me ringing in the New Year is about having fun with family and or friends. And as long as I can stay awake until midnight (naps are allowed in my book) then it was a successful night. This year Joe and I had friends come visit us in Maine for the holiday and it was wonderful. Complete with sparkly New Year’s Eve tops for all the girls and coordinating Crayola hair extensions purchased from the local grocery store. Yes Crayola apparently makes hair extensions.

And then in the morning we all awoke at a reasonably late hour, decided to nix the polar bear plunge idea, and cracked open the last two bottles of champagne for mimosas. Using up the holiday Panettone in French toast was a great way to get ready to sit and watch hours upon hours of sports.

French Toast Panettone
Panettone is a sweet Italian egg bread studded with candied fruits and nuts and can be found in pretty much any grocery store around the holidays. The idea for this came when Joe and I had purchased a large panettone and were unable to eat it before it went stale. Any kind of stale bread makes great French toast.

1 panettone
4 eggs
¾ c whole milk (or half and half)
¼ c cugar
1 tsp. vanilla
Bacon grease or butter for cooking.

Slice the panettone into reasonable sized pieces, or if you like the comedic large slices, go ahead and use those. If the bread is fresh allow it to sit out for about an hour before cooking so that the slices are a bit stale.

Whisk the eggs, milk, sugar and vanilla in a large bowl until thoroughly combined.

Preheat a griddle over medium heat and add bacon grease or butter (I usually make bacon in shifts to keep the griddle perpetually coated in grease – remember the pancakes recipe? Yeah.)

Dredge the sliced of panettone in the egg and milk mixture and carefully place onto griddle. Cook for about 2 minutes per side, flipping occasionally. Be sure the bread is cooked through - it should be a little stiff and should not ooze any of the egg when you press it with the back of a spatula.

Repeat dredging slices and cooking until all of the bread has been used up. Place cooked French toast on a platter and keep in a warm oven until ready to serve.

Zwiebelkuchen

Yes, Zwiebelkuchen. Don’t be scared. I’ll walk you through it. Svee-bell-coo-tschen. Well, that’s basically right, the tschen is really more of a throat noise, like if you were pretending to hiss with the back of your throat like a cat – that’s the noise we’re going for. Go ahead, give it a try. No one is judging you here. Zwee-bell-coo- (hiss like a cat)en. Good!

Ok now that we got that out of the way, Zweibelkuchen is an onion cake. Don’t say eww just yet! Onion cake is not literally a layer cake made from onions, it’s more like a quiche or savory tart. A crust, onions, bacon and a light custard make this little baby up, and it is delicious. This dish is found in many different countries with slight variations, but the alpine region in Europe does it the best (in my opinion). So whether you are in France, Switzerland or Italy, try it! But if you are in Germany, I implore you to get a slice.

This was another one of those experiences that was a perfect food memory for me. I had Zwiebelkuchen twice while in Germany, and now ever since I found this recipe I have been hooked. The first time I had it, was at a traditional wine harvest dinner. This was a bit more commercialized than me harvesting grapes from a sun drenched vineyard. But never the less, there was a farm, and the farmer sold tickets to his harvest dinner. In south-west Germany, it was common for farmers to need extra hands in the fall. Workers were fed a light dinner of Zwiebelkuchen and given the Neuesüsse wine to drink that evening.

Neuesüsse is the sweet, barely fermented wine that is bottled and shared directly after harvest. It is very sweet and everyone recommends not having too many glasses of it for the sake of your bowels. But it is good and it is cheap, which of course, is even better. If you can find a bottle at a farmer’s market, you can let it ferment more on a shelf, but be sure to uncork it, or the bottle is rumored to explode on you as the pressure builds.

The other time I had Zwiebelkuchen was when a roommate of mine (and I will save some of the fabulous stories about my roommates in Germany for another time)made it with some friends. This was an opportunity for onion googles, if I have ever seen one. They chopped so many pounds of onions, that the tiny apartment kitchen was lethal to be in. If someone walked into the kitchen they were hit with a wall of onion gas. It was beautiful.

So if you are stuck in a rut for holiday potluck options. Give this a try. You can follow the recipe I will share below, or you can cheap it up a bit, and use refrigerated crescent rolls, ham and a little bit of cheese for a quick brunch option.

Zwiebelkuchen
As adapted from The New German Cookbook by Jean Anderson and Hedy Würz

2 sheets puff pastry, defrosted and at room temperature
7-8 slices of thick cut bacon, chopped into small squares
1 lb. yellow onions, thinly sliced
2 tsp. caraway seeds
½ tsp. nutmeg
½ c. whole milk
¼ c. heavy whipping cream
2 eggs, beaten
salt and pepper to taste

Preheat the oven to 400°. Pinch together the two sheets of puff pastry dough and roll out to fit into a 15”x12” cookie sheet (standard size), there should be about a ½” overlap up the sides of the baking sheet.

Sauté the chopped bacon in a large skillet over medium heat, then remove the bacon, but keep the grease in the pan. Add sliced onions into pan and sauté for about 7 minutes until translucent. Then add caraway seeds and nutmeg and continue to sauté until the onion is very soft, another 7-10 minutes. If the onions start to get brown, turn the heat a little lower and stir more frequently. A little brown on the edges is fine, but not burnt or completely caramelized.

Next, pour the onions onto the puff pastry and sprinkle with bacon bits. Pull the extra puff pastry over top of the onion and bacon, forming a bit of a lip around the entire tart. Bake the Zwiebelkuchen for 15 minutes. Meanwhile, combine the milk, cream, eggs, salt and pepper. After 15 minutes remove the cookie sheet, and pour the milk mixture over top of the onions. The milk mixture should not cover the onions completely, so feel free to reserve any excess milk and egg mixture for another purpose (scrambled eggs or like Joe and I did for a ghetto carbonara). Return the cookie sheet to the oven and continue to bake for another 20-25 minutes. If the edges of the pastry get too brown, cover the sheet loosely with aluminum foil.

Once the custard has set (is no longer jiggly) remove the Zwiebelkuchen from the oven and let cool about 20 minutes. Then slice and serve! I like Zwiebelkuchen warm, but I love it cold or even reheated the next day.

Step 4 - Have Heart Attack

Don’t worry I am not actually going to instruct or even encourage you to have a heart attack. It’s just a warning that this indulgent recipe should not necessarily be had every weekend. And the title of this post may clue you in to the fact that we are talking bacon here. I know I have a couple of other recipes that call for cooking bacon, and then cooking onions in the remaining fat – but this one is a little different.

Bacon was a special treat in my house growing up. We might have BLT’s for lunch, and maybe only rarely did we have bacon for a Saturday morning breakfast. Now of course, living with Joe, breakfast meats are a staple on weekends. And if I do not have a breakfast meat available, we trek to a local diner to be sure and fill our quota for the week.

But when I have overnight guests, I do like to wow them with breakfast. And let me tell you, breakfast is not my strong suit. I fill the house with smoke (it doesn’t help that we don’t have an exhaust fan over the stove), I make misshapen and overly brown pancakes and French toast, I get frustrated and give up crying at poached eggs. But all this doesn’t mean that I don’t try.

Thankfully, when some friends from home came to visit last year around Easter, I managed to pull off a pretty decent breakfast. It was so impressive in fact that I actually had a request for the recipe I am about to share. First, however, let me give you a little background.

I used to work at a bar and carry-out restaurant in Washington DC. The carry-out was open for breakfast each morning, and I could entice Joe to drive me to work with the promise of some of Big Daddy’s pancakes. Big Daddy was the grill cook for the breakfast and lunch shifts 6 days a week. I’m not kidding, his name was Big Daddy. Well, not really, but that is how he introduced himself to me when I first started and that is what everyone always called him. Big Daddy’s pancakes were some of the greatest pancakes ever made. When I asked Big Daddy one day what his secret was, he only shared with me a little bit of his magic – bacon. The key he said was to cook the pancakes in the same spot that he cooked bacon on the flat-top gill. It helped that we went through tons of bacon, so there was always plenty to cook the pancakes with.

So on that morning last year, I took out my griddle pan, and laid some bacon down. Once they were finished I cooked some pancakes in the remaining bacon grease and then when the griddle was looking a bit dry, added more bacon and repeated to process. Some of my friends who claim to not really like pancakes went a little crazy for them (as I said, I got a request for this recipe). I was joking that the recipe would be: Step 1 - Cook Bacon, Step 2 – Cook Pancakes in Bacon grease, Step 3 – Have friends ooh and ahh over pancakes. And then a friend commented; Step 4 – Have heart attack. So there we have it, step-4 have heart attack.

But I won’t let you go away with just those steps, I’ll share with you my pancake recipe. This is the one I have been using for years now, and I seem to mess this one up less than any other versions I have tried. Although if you have a favorite pancake recipe, I highly recommend cooking them in bacon fat.

Cheater Buttermilk Pancakes
I never have buttermilk on hand, and if I do buy it, I can never seem to use it all before it spoils. So I cheat and make my own by adding lemon juice to whole milk or half and half. You can do it to skim milk, but it’s not creamy in the end, and don’t use only heavy cream because your end result will be too stiff.

1 c. cheater buttermilk (1 c whole milk or half and half with 1 Tb of lemon juice)
1 Tb vegetable oil
1 egg
1 c. all-purpose flour (I use white whole wheat, and again you might have to add a little more liquid because the whole wheat flour tends to make the batter thicker)
2 Tb sugar
2 Tb baking powder
1 tsp salt

To make the buttermilk, combine lemon juice and milk and let rest for 15 minutes. (I usually begin cooking the bacon, and get everything else ready during the curdling process.) Don’t stir it, just add your lemon juice and let it sit.

Combine all of the dry ingredients for the pancakes together, and after your milk has curdled, combine it to the beaten egg and vegetable oil. Make a well in the dry ingredients and add the wet, stirring until just combined.

Cook the bacon on the same pan that you will cook your pancakes, a flat large griddle works well for this. Start with a few pieces of bacon spread out on the pan, as they cook and shrink you can begin to pour the pancake batter on the pan. Be sure to adjust the temperature of the burner to combat any burnt or smoking bits.

After a few pancakes, the pan will be dry of bacon grease so you can either cook bacon and pancakes simultaneously at this point, or alternate bacon and pancakes in the pan. I like the simultaneous method if you are cooking for a slow to awaken crowd – this way everyone can have warm, fresh from the griddle, bacon and pancakes.

If you need to keep the pancakes or bacon warm, place them on an oven-proof platter and keep in a warm oven until ready to serve.

Or to summarize:
Step 1 – Cook Bacon
Step 2 – Cook pancakes in bacon grease
Step 3 – Have friends oooh and ahhh over pancakes cooked in bacon
Step 4 – Have heart attack