Recipe: best cheese sauce ever

Cheese sauce is an essential component to get right - for any dish, from lasagne to tuna-pasta-bake. It's one of those dishes where things like consistency and thickness depend alot on the cook and on the dish, but it's easily adaptable. All good fun, enjoy ^_^

What do I need?

Kitchen Stuff:
- Medium saucepan
- Wooden spoon
- butter knife
- milk

Ingredients:
- Butter, an eighth of a pack
- Plain flour, half a cup
- cheddar cheese (200g or so, grated)

Optional Ingredients:
- dijon mustard (1-2 tsp)
- cayenne pepper
- nutmeg (for the adventurous)
- creme fraiche
- parmesan, especially for lasagne

(makes enough for 1-2 people)

takes about 20 minutes

Step 1 -- melt the butter in the pan

Keep an eye on the butter, you don't want it to melt completely and you certainly don't want it to bubble. You're just looking for it to become soft enough to:

Step 2 -- add the flour

Sieve if you want to but it should make too much difference. Stir it into the butter gradually until it becomes paste-like.

Step 3 -- pour in a dash of milk

Stir it in, make that paste alittle more runny. this stage in the process is an exercise in patience in order to achieve a nice saucelike consistency. If you were to just add loads of milk it would just be a runny gloopy mess, this way it's smooth and lovely.

Step 4 -- keep adding milk

Keep adding the milk alittle bit at a time, so the sauce gradually becomes thicker. Once you've got it to the consistency you want it, that's the hard bit over. This is a white sauce.

Step 5 -- add the other things

Add the cheese and stir it in - keep stirring from this point onwards. Add some salt, pepper and cayenne. If you want a more creamy sauce, that works really nicely with lasagne although I have an even better recipe for that coming up sometime in the future. trust me that's well worth waiting for... but anyway... if you want you can also add a dab of dijon mustard, and a little bit of parmesan adds a stronger touch for those who want it :) A little dab of nutmeg is also an interesting change from the norm.

Step 6 -- Enjoy ^_^

You can add it to maaany things - foe example cooked pasta, tuna and sweetcorn for tuna pasta bake - just mix it together in an oven-proof dish and sprinkle some breadcrumbs and cheese and put it in the oven for 20 minutes of so...