Clueless MNetter needs three basic sauce recipes please [grovel]

[BloodshotEyeballsintheScarySky]

I am the worst, most incompetent 'cook' in the world, but I have recently started making my own red pasta sauce which is a huge achievement. Now I need three others so that I can abandon jars altogether. I also want to be able to give them to DD which I won't do with jars of sauce. The sauces I need are:

White or cheese sauce for pasta, fish pie etc.
Chilli
A mild all round curry sauce.

Googling brings up too many options and I would like ones that people swear by and are easy!

Ta very much [grovel again]

White sauce/cheese sauce

slowly melt 2 oz of butter in a pan
Add 2oz of plain flour and mix until smooth paste (use a mini whisk if you have one)
Slowly add 1 pint of boiling hot milk stirring constantly.

Thats white sauce - to amek cheese sauce add a couple of ounces of grated cheese

White sauce.

You will need

Flour
MIlk
Butter/marge

1. Heat butter in a saucepan until melted.
2. add in enough flour to make a paste (this is called a reux) with the butter.
3. Add a small amount of milk at a time waiting for your mixture to thicken before adding a little more.

1. Keep doing this untill you have a desired amount.

This is white sauce you can now add cheese/parsley/leek/mustard to make different sauces.

melt butter in pan. stir in flour til looks like cake mix. pour in little bit of a milk at a time and stir with fork/whisk until you have creamy textured sauce. ad cheese/herbs whatever.

sorry can't be more specific about quantities as have no idea how much i use!

OK MamaG's is alot easier to follow!

Chilli sauce as in chilli con carne?

Fry off mince & veg (onion, pepper, mushroom garlic in my house).

Add 2 cans chopped tomatoes & cumin to taste (about 1-2 level tsp for a family of 4-6). Splash of tom puree.

Simmer 30mins

Add a splash of bisto to thicken (sorry moondog) and kidney beans. cook for another 5mins or so.

If cooking for kids - serve theirs

Then add crushed chilli's to give it a kick for the grown ups.

Ooh lovely, thank you The Eyeballs household will enjoy its first totally home made fish pie on Tuesday night. And I shall think of you all when we're stuffing our faces!

Sorry JS, yes chilli con carne. (the jar only says chilli !

Thank you

I'd add a bit of a warning about cheese sauce - I always take the white sauce off the heat for a couple of minutes before adding the grated cheese, as I managed to curdle some once by putting the cheese in while the sauce was still really boiling.

I should have said with the chilli I use 500g mince.

If there is only the 3 of you this would probably stretch to 2 meals....so don't add the crushed chilli's to teh saucepan...just sprinkle them on your plate. That way you can stick the leftovers in a dish...freeze it and viola you have a meal for next week, and it won't blow DD's head off (speaks from experience here ).

And by crushed chilli's I mean these. They don't need to be cooked...so you can sprinkle them on your plate to add a kick to any meal that you are sharing with DCs.

what kind of curry sauce do you mean? I generally find that a jar of curry paste mixed with tomatoes/stock/coconut milk (depending on curry paste) is easy and delicious. Or do you actually want to mix herbs and spices together?

Er...I think for starters the curry paste job. I'll think about herbs and spices when I'm more... accomplished!

Patak is your friend....

The Rogan Josh one is excellent and I mix it with tinned tomatoes. As you get more accomplished, you can add extra things that you think are lacking -eg I add extra onion (to what they recommend on the jar), extra cinnamon and extra chilli.

The jars of Pataks curry pastes (as opposed to curry sauce) all have recipes on teh side. We do the korma and tikka ones as described on teh jar and they seem to come out OK.