Recipes instead of meal plans

Truthfully, my meal plan is only half done for this week. I am feeling really short on ingredients and too tired to come up with much. So tomorrow, I will probably go to a nifty site like allrecipes.com where I can type in my ingredients and they will offer recipes.
But, I thought that I would share a couple of the recipes that I came up with last week. Just so that we are clear, I have no illusions that I know how to cook any exotic or specific ethnic foods. I am Irish and English, who eat meat and potatoes or fish and chips. So I will fully acknowledge that while the following recipes have words such as ginger or curried, they are Canadianized or Marissa-ized in every way. We still found them quite satisfying though.

Curried Squash Soup/Sauce

3 c. squash puree

5 tsp. curry powder

5 cloves garlic

1 med. Cooking onion

1 apple, peeled, sliced and cored

2 c. water or milk (I did one of each)

2 tbs or so Honey

Salt to taste (I used about 1 tsp)

Butter or oil

Saute garlic, onion and apple in butter (or oil if you prefer),  add curry powder (you could add more, I just didn’t want to overdo it for the girls), salt, and honey; sauté briefly. Add to pureed squash and 1 cup water in the food processor and blend until smooth. Pour into sauce pan, add 1 cup of water and milk, heat on low.

I served it with left over rice; it is quite thick and kind of worked as a sauce. This was probably the most heartily enjoyed meal of the week. Cecily especially kept asking for more and there were no leftovers in sight.

Ginger Beef Stir Fry

Sauce

2 tbs cornstarch

½ c. water

1 lg orange, juiced

½ c. soy sauce

1 tbs honey

2 tsp ginger

2 tbs sesame seeds

Salt to taste

Few flakes of red pepper

Stirfry

1 lb stew meat (or sirloin sliced if you feel extravagant)

½ cooking onion

2 carrots

1 head of broccoli

½ lg red bell pepper

3-5 cloves garlic crushed

about 2 tbs olive oil

Salt to taste

Few flakes of red pepper

Brown meat in oil and set aside to sauté the thinly sliced/chopped vegetables. Mix up the ingredients for the sauce in a small bowl using a whisk to remove all cornstarch lumps. Once the vegetables are mostly tender, add browned meat and sauce. Simmer on a low heat until vegetables are tender.

Serve with rice.