Cinnamon Apples

This is apple pie comfort without the crust, soft, spiced apples in a warm syrup, ready in about 20 minutes. A treat like this, made entirely from real food, is part of what makes eating this way feel like a lifestyle you actually want to keep, sweetness included.

The apples bring fiber, one of the things that helps feed a healthier gut community, and the cinnamon adds its own warming polyphenols. This is a higher-sugar dessert by AIP standards, so it is one to enjoy now and then rather than every night, and it happens to be low-histamine, which is useful if you are watching that alongside everything else.

Let the kitchen fill with the smell of cinnamon and apple as it simmers down, because that is half the comfort. Serve the apples warm, on their own or spooned over a little coconut ice cream, and pause for the first bite. A humble fruit, gently cooked, eaten with attention, is a complete and grounding dessert.

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup apple juice
• 1 tablespoon honey
• 1 tablespoon maple sugar
• 3/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1/4 cup lemon juice
• 6 apples, peeled and chopped

Every ingredient here is already elimination-friendly, with nothing to swap. The source has no cream, so there is nothing to swap to coconut. A reader tip suggests allspice in place of cinnamon on some low-histamine protocols, but allspice is excluded on the elimination phase, so keep the cinnamon as written and leave allspice out.

Method

• In a saucepan, bring the apple juice, honey, maple sugar, cinnamon, and ginger to a boil, stirring.
• Add the lemon juice and let it boil for one more minute.
• Stir in the chopped apples, lower the heat, and cook, stirring, until the apples are soft.
• Serve warm.

Instant Pot variation

To make these hands-off, add all the ingredients to the Instant Pot at once and slow cook on low for about 4 hours, until the apples are soft. The source gives the slow-cook timing but not a high-pressure conversion, so that faster path is left for kitchen testing rather than guessed at here.

*Adapted from acleanplate.com*

*Lower-sugar note: the sugar here is the apples, not added sweetener. For a lighter serving, use a smaller portion, or blend in a splash of water or coconut milk to stretch the batch so each serving carries less.*