Can't make menuconfig

You should have run (as root)

aptitude update
aptitude search libncurses

that would suggest you the right package name.

Then try

aptitude install libncurses-dev

and

aptitude install kernel-package
aptitude build-dep linux-image linux-image-amd64 

At last, use make-kpkg --initrd binary to compile your kernel. (it will produce *.deb files in the parent directory). You want to configure /etc/kernel-pkg.conf and perhaps /etc/kernel-img.conf

I had the same problem. In my case installation of package libncursesw5-dev solved the issue.