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Our first phase of remodeling on the house took longer than expected, so I'm anticipating this one will as well, especially since we also plan to have the front bedroom extended over the front of the house, and will be taking part of the downstairs bedroom closet for the kitchen. The front part of the house is original, built in 1907, but it had some not great 1960s remodeling decisions (in one case a major structural one, and there were also electrical issues). We did a first phase of remodeling almost four years ago. The back part of the house was added on in the 1960s at the same time as the remodeling, and it had more issues than the 1907 part.
I may start a thread on kitchen remodeling thoughts. I do not have it pinned down yet.
Thanks for your comments, Mike. KAF has promoted the blitz pastry as an easy alternative, but the result was anything but easy when I tried to work with it. The taste of the so-called turnovers (maybe four of the sixteen actually look like turnovers) is excellent. I've been eating the blob ones--someone has to destroy the evidence 🙂 --and the taste is also excellent. If I try this blitz pastry again, I'll only make a half recipe and leave the butter in larger chunks than I did. The recipe says, "about the size of a thumbnail," but that is a two-dimensional rather than a three-dimensional description. I also think it would be helpful if the recipe specified the thickness to which the dough is to be rolled out. I could then use my pie wands so it would be even. If I make the blitz pastry again, I would also note that figure.
Today I tried a new recipe: Peach and Ginger Turnovers, from KAF's Whole Grain Baking (pp513-514). It did not go well.
The recipe uses a "blitz puff pastry" dough using whole wheat pastry flour and bread flour. This technique is somewhat new for me, so perhaps I just did not do it right. However, I think this is pastry recipe is similar to the KAF blueberry turnover recipe I tried a few years back with similar frustration. I threw the KAF recipe over for Ken Haedrich's blueberry hand-pie cruss. (Thank you to Dachshundlady for bringing Ken's recipe to our attention on the Baking Circle.) His hand-pie crust is a lot easier and gives nicer results. If I get more peaches, I'll try this filling with his pastry recipe.
The peach and ginger filling is wonderful, although I do think that the recipe should tell you to make it the day before and refrigerate it, as that improves its texture and makes it easier to enclose in the dough. As for the blitz puff pastry, if I am ever crazy enough to try it again, I would cut the dough into four pieces before refrigerating it. That way, the baker only has to roll out an 8x8-inch piece each time and cut it into four squares, then fill the turnovers and seal closed. The cookbook specifies rolling it into a 16x16-inch square, and as I was doing so, I realized that my parchment (used Reynolds) has a maximum width of 15inches. (Oh, why did I trust KAF?! Well, because usually their recipes work.) Rolling out that much dough at once also makes it more likely that it will be overworked. The directions should have taken that into consideration.
My dough stuck, in spite of flouring the parchment. I ended up cutting the parchment in half, and putting each half onto a cookie sheet (I did not have a cookie sheet wide enough to handle a 16-inch square) and putting it back in the refrigerator to let it chill again before shaping, and it was still hard to handle. I did get some triangles, but I got more blobs and a lot of spilled filling. It was so frustrating that if I'd not used such expensive ingredients, I might have just thrown it all away. I ended up baking it in two batches. At least the taste is good but very few are the nice little turnover triangles, and most are blobs of various shapes.
