Butternut Squash "Chili"

Usually one of my favourite things to make and eat, but my kitchen is so small and I didn't have all of my usual ingredients that this couldn't really be called chili. I refuse to admit that I made chili because my butternut squash chili is one of my favourite dishes and this was not up to that caliber.

I also can't believe this kitchen doesn't have an oven!

The preparation:

Tiny space, limited supplies, minimum ingredients? Challenge accepted.

Unfortunately sliced myself with this sharper-than-it-seems-but-still-not-sharp-enough knife and did not have any ointment or bandages. So I made a make-shift one out of a paper towel and hopefully it won't need any special antiseptic stuff.

The cooking:

Eventually finished dicing all the tomatoes and began cooking them with some pepper & cayenne pepper (the only two spices I have).

Added a jalapeno pepper to the simmering tomatoes.

Normally I sautee the onions with garlic and EVOO first, but I needed the tomatos to really simmer down so I cooked that first and used some of the "paste" as my "oil" to cook these onion bits.

Added everything and some beans to the simmering pot.

Challenge no. 2 of the night: get the skin off of this squash. It's really hard.

Added in the squash slowly because of the damn unpeeling. I was also having trouble around this point in time with how my "chili" was going to taste because I had just cleaned the counter with this antibacterial spray and everything smelled citrusy. I never really use recipes when I cook and totally relay on my sense of smell so I was getting a bit worried. I really should just follow recipes.

Simmering some more... the squash always takes forever to cook and the beans forever to "soak" up the flavour.

Finally.

 While I was waiting for the chili to simmer, I gorged on this lovely speciman:

Check out this lovely loaf of bread I found in Woolsworth!

Mmm.