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Breakfast

Pittsburgh/Arizona Fusion Cuisine: Fried Bologna Migas

Not that I'm thinking about theme food for a football game or anything, but what about this for an inspired Rust Belt/Sun Belt fusion dish?

My family is from Pittsburgh, so I associate the foods I ate in my youth with the Iron City. And I ate a lot of fried bologna and scrambled eggs. My father, who grew up in the South Hills part of town, considered fried bologna a delicacy. When he made us fried bologna sandwiches, he always made an incision on a radius from the center of the slice to the outer edge to allow the bologna to shrink. As I recall, the bologna was usually black by the time he was done frying it. For breakfast, he favored fried bologna and scrambled eggs.

I've been in Texas for most of the rest of my life, and the Tex-Mex dish called migas has become as common breakfast at my house. Robert Amaya of Amaya's Taco Village in Austin once told me that migas isn't really a breakfast dish among Tejanos. When he was growing up in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, his family didn't ate eggs for breakfast. They ate migas on Friday nights and during Lent when Catholics couldn't eat meat.

I put ham, chorizo or bacon in my migas sometimes, so the idea of substituting fried bologna seemed like a natural. Tasted great to me, but I can't say that anyone else at my house was interested in joining me for breakfast.

-Robb Walsh

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Robb Walsh
Contact: Robb Walsh