In case you haven’t looked out your window recently, know this: It’s fall! The best time of year! The season that smells like crisp leaves and votive candles burning inside pumpkins! The months when you get to snuggle in sweaters and flannel and cozy PJs! The time you dress up and eat candy or stay smugly inside and laugh at the fools who spend all that time and energy just to be uncomfortable in their costumes!

There aren’t enough exclamation points!

To take advantage of glorious autumn, we took a trip to the orchard and picked a bucket-full-o’ pears. Red and green Bartletts were in season, and they were easy to pick from the low branches at Sherwood Orchards. Eric was good enough to be primary Peeper wrangler while I focused on picking pears. Because we needed a lot of pears—pears for this almost-too-easy-to-be-true spiced pear sauce.

Boy, was I successful (more so than when we tried to pick strawberries while trying to keep Peeper from eating ALL THE BERRIES). We went home with almost 15 pounds of pears.  They were some of the best pears I’ve ever tasted, and Peeper liked them, too: She’d point up to the box of fruit ripening on the counter and stamp her feet until someone handed her one. (Wish we’d gotten a video of that!)

But when you have 15 pounds of Bartletts, you can’t simply eat ’em all. Enter: Awesomesauce Spiced Pear Sauce! We ate this twice a day (and not more often because, should you really eat the same thing at every meal?), mostly with yogurt. Peeper, who’s a light eater, always finished off her servings. One breakfast she had three helpings. Suffice to say, it was a family hit.

I made a big batch with the intention of canning some, but I ended up just freezing several big portions and ate the rest fresh. The sauce will keep in the fridge about one week—if it lasts that long.

Now get going and make this spiced pear sauce. You can thank me later.

Spiced Pear Sauce

Ingredients

10 lbs. ripe pears, peeled, cored and chopped into big chunks
Juice from 1 lemon
1 tablespoon cinnamon*1 1/2 teaspoons cardamom*
Water
*These proportions make a medium spiced sauce. Feel free to adjust according to your family’s preferences.

Instructions

1. In a large soup pot, combine all the ingredients with enough water to cover the bottom of the pot so it doesn’t burn or stick. (Don’t worry if you add a little too much; you can just cook it longer until the sauce condenses.)
2. Heat until the pears bubble lightly. Cook until the pears are tender, about 20 minutes.
3. [Blend the sauce with an immersion blender or, if you prefer chunkier sauce, with a potato masher.

It’s seriously that easy. You can eat this with granola or yogurt; if you get ambitious you could cook it down to pear butter; you could even serve it with a dollop of ice cream for dessert. No one will believe it’s a sugar-free healthy dessert!