Tuna Casserole

Sounds boring, right? Wrong. Tuna casserole is delicious, but it's all in the sauce

I start by making a roux; that is, equal parts butter and flour. Doesn't have to be exact and doesn't have to be much - maybe like a tablespoon of each. You cook them till it smells toasty.

From there I add milk about half a cup at a time, stirring until it gets thick, at which point more milk goes in. The idea is you keep adding milk until you have enough sauce for the pasta. In theory there should be a limit to how much milk you can add and still get a creamy sauce, but in my experience, the roux is one-size-fits all; in other words, whether you add 1 or 4 cups of milk, it will still thicken properly.

At this point, you can stop the sauce there and season with salt and pepper. It will taste like a creamy milk sauce, which would be kind of bland to just pour on pasta, but is good in this case as a base for the tuna casserole as a whole.

BUT, if you have cheese on hand, add it at the end, over the stove. Especially if you have a cheese that is otherwise not a smooth melter, like Cheddar. As a kid I used to get so disappointed, because although boring cheese like American would melt great in milk, really good cheese like Cheddar would form these rubbery clumps. But because of the starches in the roux, you can melt any cheese in this sauce.

The rest of the recipe is just mixing your sauce with some cooked pasta (for best results I'd recommend something that has lots of nooks and crannies to grab sauce - macaroni, ziti, penne, rotini, farfalle - all good choices), canned tuna, and seasoning with salt and pepper. We like ours with a little mustard and garlic powder too. If you're a ketchup fan that might work too.