"So a time or two when I've made this I haven't had real, live bacon on hand (and another time I was just too lazy) so instead of frying bacon at the beginning, I used a tablespoon or two of butter to cook the onion in and proceeded with the recipe that way - using the precooked crumbled bacon (from Costco in my case) to add to the potato salad at the end (I used about 1/2 cup and gave the bacon crumbles a quick 20-second round in the microwave to crisp up a bit). You may not get as much bacon flavor but the salad is still very delicious varied this way...."