All it does in Boston lately is rain every single day so this spicy and hearty recipe felt very fall and yet still appropriate when we made it. In his new cookbook, Food 2.0, the brilliant Charlie Ayers, former executive chef at Google, proclaimed that this dish was “slamming.” And oh how it lived up to its reputation…

CK and I have been obsessively watching Supernatural on DVD in the evenings so our nightly routines goes something like this: get home, I whine about not wanting to go on a run, CK makes me, shower, make dinner, watch silly boys battle ghosties, beasties, and ghoulies until I fall asleep on the couch. What’s missing? Oh yeah! That whole clean-up the kitchen thing.

So on Butternut Chilijack night, we were both very lazy and left the kitchen a complete mess. Honestly I didn’t even give it another thought. After all, CK is a fabulous kitchen picker-upper, but than I got a phone call and an odd question was posed to me, “Which towels don’t you like?”

It would seem that while trying to dispose of the butternut squash peelings in the garbage disposal something awful happened. The sink plugged, a leak sprung, and when poor CK bent over to investigate under the cupboard the pipe exploded stringy squash all over CK and the kitchen.

Just because you’ve always successfully stuffed everything from banana peels to limes down the disposal doesn’t mean it wont get back at you in some malicious way when you least expect it. In the end, I came home from work, the lovely maintenance man fixed the disposal, the kitchen was cleaned, and Chef Ayers Chilijack will live on in kitchen infamy.

Butternut Chilijack
Originally published in Food 2.0 by Charlie Ayers
Serves 4

2 butternut squashes, peeled, seeded, and diced
2 red onions, diced (Note: I only used one as I’m not a super fan of red onion).
1/4 cup sliced jalapeno chillies (from a can or jar)
1 tbsp mild chili powder
1/4 tsp cayenne
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 tbsp grapeseed oil
2 tomatoes, diced, or 1 cup drained, canned crushed tomatoes
2 cups frozen corn kernels, thawed (Note: I left this out. CK wanted it, but I wasn’t feeling very corn friendly that night)
2 cups shredded Monterey Jack cheese
A handful of fresh cilantro leaves torn into pieces

Preheat the oven to 375ºF (190ºC). Combine the squash, onions, and chilies in a roasting pan and season with chili powder, cayenne, salt and pepper. Drizzle the grapeseed oil over and toss well. Roast until just tender but still with some texture, 25-30 minutes.

Remove from the oven and tip into a large bowl. Add the tomatoes, corn, Monterey Jack cheese, and cilantro. Mix gently until the cheese begins to melt. Serve warm

Friends, Romans, Cookbook collectors — if you signed up for gmail a million years ago (like I did) and you pride yourself on the fact that you own your first and last name @gmail.com without a ridiculous amount of letters and symbols following it, then please please please take a moment to check your account settings to see if the secondary email you used to obtain your wondrous email is still active. Hypothetically speaking, let’s say you change your password on a whim after arriving home from watching the Cloverfield monster destroy Manhattan. Then let’s say you get the cold of the century and subsist on alternate doses of dayquil and nyquil for three days straight, and just maybe you happen to forget your password — you’re going to be screwed.

You see, Google’s slick little recovery system is more than happy to reset your password for you, but it emails it to your secondary account. Unfortunately, in my case, that email was linked to a Road Runner account I had in Maine 3 years ago. Oops! Next I had the pleasure of having to wait 24 hours before Google would allow me to try to access my account via a security question. I spent the last 24 hours in a state of abject terror, praying that I had selected a question I could remember the answer to. Literally my whole life is ensconced in my gmail via folders and folders of organized insanity. Photos, recipes, all of the details surrounding the Maid of Honor duties for my cousin’s wedding…talk about anxiety.

Well tonight I said a little prayer and google asked me to prove my worth by telling it who my first teacher was. It took me like 15 attempts before it let me in after I finally remembered my nursery school teacher’s name. You guys, I literally burst into tears. I would have lost my mind if I had to try to recreate my 207 google reader subscriptions. Don’t be like me! Write down your passwords and review your account settings or you might end up being erincooks6789654@gmail.com. And that people, is true horror.