Hi! I’m Betty. Welcome to Betty’s Kitchen. Today, we’re making Tuna Casserole. And we’re going to start by choosing a pasta and I’ve chosen bowties. You can use any kind of pasta that you like. This happens to be a 12 ounce container and I need half of it. I need six ounces of pasta. And I’m going to cook that. I have about an inch of water back here that is boiling rapidly. I’ll turn up a little bit more. I have salted it with one tablespoon of salt. If you don’t salt your pasta while your cooking it, sometimes it's really hard to get it soften enough later on. So, I’m just going to estimate half the box and you see it is seven ton. So, I will pick it at the top, I’ll start here and want go down there. And that looks good. I can see the top of it there. So, it's not an exact measurement, it doesn’t have to be, but that is cold water down a little bit so I'm going to turn that up probably work on our sauce.

What I have here are two tablespoons of butter melted. And I’m going to add to that one quarter cup of flour. And what I’ll need to do is mix that in before I add anything else. So, I want to take it off the stove. I don’t want to be mixing it while it’s cooking. You can do that but you just have to move very rapidly and this is the easy way. You want to get all of your butter and flour incorporated together otherwise you may have lumps. And this little sauce we’re going to make. So, that’s a nice roux that we can use as the base of our sauce. Now, we’ll be moving to the heat and I want to place my additives in there first. I have 1 ½ cups of milk—skimmed milk here. Any kind of milk that you like to use, 1 ½ cups and I will add that in. And then I want to add in some parmesan cheese. This is finely shredded. It is six ounces which is equivalent to 1 ½ cups. So, I decided not to put that in measuring cups which is now, that is 1 ½ cups as well as the milk is 1 ½ cups.

So now, I have the beginning of what is a nice cheese sauce. So, I’m going to bring it over to the heat and stir and cook this over a little heat and now it makes a nice bubbly crust. My bowtie pasta is cooking away back from the back burner. And here, I’m just going to make sure that I don’t let this stick. You don’t let it get in lumps and when I come back in just a minute, I’ll have a nice cheese sauce, a parmesan cheese sauce and I will have some cooked noodles which I will cook until they are just a little—show of being completely done. So, I see you back in a minute.

I’m back with my cheese sauce, it's’ all done. You can see it's nice velvety texture and we will be using that. Since it's done, I’m going to turn it off. Actually, I don’t want to salt it eventhough we salted the noodles, it's nice to have a less salt and I think this cheese sauce does need a little bit salt just to have that around. Now, as far as the noodles are concern, they are cooked just like I like them. They are holding their shape really well. You don’t want them mushy at all because actually we’re going to bake this casserole in the oven, so we will get more heat later on. What I need to do is turn that off and then I need to drain back in to this container. I need something to mix with so I’m just going to use this container back to my workspace. And what we’re going to add would be our cheese sauce. And that in itself would be a nice dish if you just wanted to put that in a baking dish, stick it in the oven for about half hour then you would have the noodles with parmesan sauce and that would be great. But since our goal is to make tuna casserole, what I’m going to do is to add some tuna. I have two of this standard size, I think they are six ounces. I’m taking two chocolate drained cans of tuna. I’m adding it to our mixture. There’s one and there is another.

Now, to add a little color and a little extra taste, I’m going to be blending in some green peas. And these are just frozen actually. Maybe you see that they’ll roll around on the can. And I’m just going to add them in and I’m going to add and stir and kind of estimate how much I have put in. This is in a 16 ounce container then we did find out we’re goin g to need all of that. So, what I have put in is I would say maybe ½ cup of frozen peas. So, I would just stir that around and get that all mixed together. And what I’m saying at this point is that it is just a little bit thick. So, I’m going to get it into the refrigerator and get some milk and I’ll measure this, so you don’t know how much I have added. We’d start it out with 1 ½ cups of milk. So, let’s add ½ cup. Well, I just fill this to one cup and then pour from there. Okay. That is one cup but I don’t think I’ll need all of it. So, I'm going to try to do half of it. Okay, that’s a half of a cup. And stir that around. You do want this to be nice and bubbly. So, when you see anything that you mixed up like I did there to be very thick and you feel like that’s not going to work, then you need to adjust. And in our case, it’s just, add more milk. I think I will add that entire cup. So, we started with 1 ½ cups and I think this is a place that I’ve added. Instead of adding it to that sauce, we didn’t need a really soupy sauce but we need it to be a little thinner at this point before we put it in the casserole. So, when I arrived at the recipe, I will go ahead and instruct you to add the 1 ½ cups of milk as we’re making that cheese sauce. And then as you're blending this together, it will be an additional one cup of milk. That’s what you want it look.

So now, I’m going to spray a cooking dish, just an ovenproof dish. This is a pyrex dish and that’s circular, it doesn’t have to be circular. Spray that with some kind of cooking spray. This is Canola oil. And then if we have more then we’ll work. This is done actually in terms of serving if you wanted to have a bite a little snack in the afternoon but I think we’ll get it all in there. And it will taste better when it is baked. It gives more of a browned appearance and it will be nice and crusty and tasty. So, there is our tuna casserole all made up. You see how much that adding that milk in helped, you don’t want to ruin a recipe by sticking to some standard that you think, well, it's probably going to need a certain amount. And then when you look at it, it just doesn’t look right. Adjust it at that point instead of having something that doesn’t work at all. At this point, I’m going to put this casserole into a preheated oven. It's at 350 degrees and I put it towards the middle—and toward the center. And I’m going to expect that it might be 25 minutes or so but I’ll keep track at the time and I’ll be back to show you what it looks like when it's done.

My Tuna Casserole is done and I’ve been checking out it continuously for the last two minutes at least. And I went ahead and let it baked for 35 minutes to get this nice brown top in the edge. And I’ll let you see what it looks like. So, I’m just going to dig into it. And now that you get an idea of this nice crusty ram, you want to get some that if you can and it is deliciously flavored because of that cheese. So, when you serve it up, you’re going to get a nice generous portion like that and that’s what it looks like then with the nice salad or something like that to go with it makes a wonderful dinner.