Best fall recipes without pumpkin

Give pumpkin a rest and celebrate the other flavors of fall -- apples, pears, butternut squash -- with nine easy and delicious recipes.

I didn't mean for this to turn into the pumpkin-less fall. Really. I'm not a hater of pumpkin, as evidenced by all the pumpkin recipes I've posted in the past.

But this year? Can we please just give pumpkin-spice-whatevs a rest?

For just once, let's celebrate all the other stars of fall, too -- apples, pears, butternut squash, acorn squash -- and give pumpkin a day off.

Check out my favorite no pumpkin fall recipes below, with everything from breakfast muffins to crunchy salads and creamy comfort food weeknight dinners to chewy cookie bars.

Apple Biscoff cookie bars: a recipe

Apple Biscoff cookie bars

Why have I not made more cookie bars? WHY?

It's the perfect marriage of cake and cookie: it's like getting two treats in one.

Where has the cookie bar been all my life? WHERE?

I went trolling for an apple cake-ish kind of recipe the other day because I had a few Honeycrisp apples left. I didn't want them to go to waste, but they were a day or two past their crispiest point -- you know, the crispy point that makes you just want to eat it plain and not waste it by baking it.

And what goes better with apples, we all now know, than Biscoff spread? NOTHING.

Thank goodness the Internet Fates chose to throw an adaptable cookie bar recipe my way.

I doctored up a recipe that featured peanut butter and apples because I knew the Biscoff spread would just make it that much better (peanut butter is beginning to take a back seat in our house to Biscoff spread and Nutella -- how about yours?).

And I was right.

Biscoff cake: a recipe

Biscoff cake

In case you haven't been able to hear me screaming with joy about it here in Vermont, Biscoff cookies are now available in a spread.

Nutella, you may have just met your match.

I love these cookies. Seriously love. Before they were readily available in grocery stores in the United States, I used to try purposely to book my flights on Delta Airlines because it meant I could get two little Biscoffs with my cup of water.

And I'm not alone in my obsession. I have a friend and former co-worker who, on a flight we shared from Seattle back to North Carolina, went out of her way to befriend the flight attendant solely for the purpose of scoring extra Biscoff.

I think she may have broken some kind of world record for Biscoff Snarfed in One Sitting.

If you've never tasted them before (and my heart breaks for you, really, it does), they have a unique vanilla cinnamon sugar kind of thing going on, with just a hint of spice to keep it interesting. So now imagine that in a spread that is the consistency of peanut butter.

Those Belgians, they are freakin' geniuses.