Pear bread

I bought some D'Anjou pears at the grocery store the other day. I bought eight of them. Why I bought so many pears that would all come ripe at the same time is a bit of a mystery even for me. For the past few days I have been looking around for ways of using them. I have a recipe for poached pears served over vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce that I would love to try, but I don't think I should poach a bunch of pears for my own consumption. Maybe when I have guests over sometime I will try that. Today I found a pear bread recipe online that I thought I would try. I opted to use 1/2 oil and 1/2 unsweetened apple sauce, since many of the reviews said that the apple sauce was a good substitution. I did not use all apple sauce because I don't usually make any "low-fat" substitutions, so even using half was a bit of a risk for me. I also used 1/2 light brown sugar and 1/2 white sugar, also something that other bakers had tried. I left out the pecans since I usually prefer my quick breads without nuts. My own twist on the recipe was to top it with streusel (which happens to be made with walnuts, so I ended up with nuts on my bread anyway). Nobody suggested this, but I thought it would be good. The recipe was for two 8x4 inch loaves, but since I only have 9x5 loaf pans I decided to make one loaf and some muffins with the leftover batter. The muffins are out of the oven and I tried one. It was quite good. It reminds me of a light spice cake (it has cinnamon and nutmeg in it), just with chunks of pear. The streusel was good, too. The flavor blended well with the muffin. The good news is that I used almost 4 pears (I ate part of one), and since I ate one earlier and gave one to Nicole yesterday I only have two pears left. I think I can manage to eat them before they go bad. I do like pears. :)