A Lovely Breakfast: Apple Turnovers

I had an October weekend off, a few extra mountain apples from Granny and Poppa, and a leftover puff pastry from making chicken pot pie a couples weeks ago. Put it all together and what do you get?! A lovely breakfast of apple turnovers! Ina Garten helped out -- she lended me her Apple Turnovers recipe from footnetwork.com. I may've gotten a little too into Ina. After the third or fourth muttered "oh Ina, this is going to be so good!" Patrick started giving me weird looks. I guess I couldn't contain my excitement. We also halved the recipe to makes 4 turnovers. Be sure to read the notes after the recipe, it was a morning filled with drama!

Apple Turnovers  Serves: 8
Ingredients
1 teaspoon grated orange zest
3 tablespoons freshly squeezed orange juice
1 1/4 pounds tart apples, such as Empire or Granny Smith (3 apples)
3 tablespoons dried cherries  We used cranberries because they were in the pantry
3 tablespoons sugar, plus extra to sprinkle on top
1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg
Pinch kosher salt
1 package (17.3 ounces, 2 sheets) frozen puff pastry, defrosted
1 egg beaten with 1 tablespoon water, for egg wash

Directions
    Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Combine the orange zest and orange juice in a bowl. Peel, quarter, and core the apples and then cut them in 3/4-inch dice. Immediately toss the apples with the zest and juice to prevent them from turning brown. Add the cherries, sugar, flour, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt.
    Flour a board and lightly roll each sheet of puff pastry to a 12 by 12-inch square. Cut each sheet into 4 smaller squares and keep chilled until ready to use.
    Brush the edges of each square with the egg wash and neatly place about 1/3 cup of the apple mixture on half of the square. Fold the pastry diagonally over the apple mixture and seal by pressing the edges with a fork. Transfer to a sheet pan lined with parchment paper. Brush the top with egg wash, sprinkle with sugar, make 2 small slits, and bake for 20 minutes, until browned and puffed. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Notes
   If you've got puff pastry in the freezer but didn't plan on breakfast, no worries. Just set it on a pan next to a window while you're prepping everything!


   Then your oven might decide to go off half way through cooking the pastry. If this happens flip the breaker and move on to the toaster. I'm not really sure what happened this morning but there was a lot of beeping and no cooking. :-( But we finished the pastries in the toaster oven without any trouble.

And if you're feeling craft and making breakfast for a loved one, put some hearts on it with extra puff pastry!

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