A quick stove top recipe for apple pear cranberry sauce. It’s great on meat or delicious by itself as dessert.

Wondering why you’re seeing an applesauce recipe 2 days before December and not 3 months ago?

Well, I shall tell you.

1. I was in the mood to bake on Monday. Like bake, bake. Cookie galore bake (perhaps because the second Thanksgiving was over, every food blogger I know threw up a holiday cookie recipe). Except guess who didn’t (and still doesn’t) have any sugar in her house? Yep. No sugar. Who the hell runs out of sugar?  Is this the depression or something? I was making fun of a coworker last month for not having yeast on hand and now look at me.

2. My entire “crisper” drawer is still filled with apples from our csa. There are some that are getting so old the skin looks more wrinkly than my 83 year old grandma’s (who actually has quite nice skin though so that’s not a great analogy, but let’s just pretend).

3. My beloved Autumn Harvest candle is now officially burned out. (The applesauce makes the house smell like that candle in case you didn’t catch the correlation there.)

4. I had an intense craving for oatmeal with simmered apples stirred on top on Monday. Stupidly, I gave into the craving before I made the applesauce and had a pretty pathetic bowl of oats with a glob of almond butter instead. Of course, I had to rectify that yesterday morning with the actual applesauce and so now I’m 0 for 2 on staying paleo for breakfast this week. Which, I’ve realized I kind of like. I thoroughly enjoy carbs in the morning. After 10am, couldn’t care less for them outside of veggies and fruit.  So this eating approach may become “a thing”.

And that is why applesauce is debuting itself on November 28.

I did try to be slightly festive and seasonally appropriate by throwing in some cranberries and pears for good measure.

If there’s one thing outside of cookies this time of year that are amazing, it’s pears.

Last year we got a mystery Harry & David tower of goodies that included 12 of their fabulous pears (among all the other moose munch type of stuff I have no interest in) and I was in heaven.

We seriously have no idea who the person was that sent it and there was no message, but fingers crossed he comes through again this year.

Mama needs some free pears!

Between the combination of tart and sweet apples, the fresh cranberries and the pears, this is like the perfect combination of sweet & lip puckering.

I used to eat lemons as a kid, I enjoy a good lip pucker.

It’s not quite a cookie, but it’ll do.

At least until I get more sugar.

Looking for a more traditional cranberry sauce? Try this slow cooker cranberry sauce that only uses 5 ingredients or, my favorite, bourbon cranberry sauce!