Americanized Slovak Haluski

For potato dumplings (Haluski):

In a medium bowl, mix flour, eggs, potato puree, baking powder, and salt together throughly – mixing it into a sticky dough. Set aside.

Take a large pot, fill it a little over half full with water and add a dash of salt to the water. Boil water on high heat.

On medium heat in a skillet, fry up the bacon till crisp and then remove bacon from the pan and allow it to drain on paper towels. Cool bacon and then crumble it. Keep bacon fat in the skillet for caramelizing onions and frying up dumplings.

In the same skillet, caramelize chopped onions on low heat. This should take about 30-45 minutes, occassionally stirring. When they are done, drain onions in a strainer over a small glass bowl reserving bacon fat and the set aside. Keep the same skillet to fry the dumplings.

In the meantime, on a small cutting board place the Haluski dough and with a knife, cut about 1 teaspoon sized pieces. Hold the board over the boiling water and drop the dough into the water. You might want to do this in batches – a ladle sized amount of dough pieces at a time.

Let each small batch boil till dumplings are throughly cooked and floating to the top of the boiling water. (They sink when first dropped in). Repeat with another batch of dough until you’ve used it all.

Strain dumplings out of the water and add them to a medium bowl to drain for a moment. Then take each batch and add them to the skillet. Add a little bacon fat over the dumplings and fry on both sides on medium heat till brown. Repeat with the remaining batches of dough as they finish boiling.

Place dumplings into a large serving bowl. Sprinkle bacon crumbles, two slices of cheese, a Tablespoon of caramelized onions at a time for each layer. Repeat the layering process as you finish cooking additional batches of dumplings – frying in the pan, layering into the large serving dish with bacon, onions and cheese until full batch is done (approximately four times of layering).

When complete, take a large spoon and throughly mix Haluski with all of the other layers to incorporate all the ingredients thoroughly.

Serve as is or add Kielbasa on the side or slice up Kielbasa and mix it in with Haluski!

Garnish with sprinkles of freshly chopped chives on top, add a dollop of sour cream to each serving and serve with a nice warm crusty bread!