Oxtail Stew

One of my favourites! With the weather turning cold here I thought it the perfect dish for today. Now what follows is my recollection of what a “dumped” into the pot… yep, it’s bit like that and it tends to change every time… What I do is go buy some root vegetables, the oxtail of course and  some other bits and bobs and just stick in a pot. It’s never failed so give it a whirl 😀

Ingredients

• Oxtail (standard “pack”, at least6 pieces)
• 2/3 of a bottle of decent red wine
• Good wallop of decent (read not filled with chemicals and additives) meat tenderiser or steak sauce (anything like this, just spikes the flavour nicely)
• Veg stock
• 500ml of passata (sieved tomatoes, tomato puree will do)
• One sweet potato, chopped
• 2 decent sized normal potatoes, chopped
• A few carrots, chopped
• A couple turnips (this is new for today’s stew…), chopped
• 2 Onions, sliced
• 3-4 decent sized cloves of garlic, finely chopped
• few sticks of celery, chopped

Method

• Stick the oxtail in your biggest stewing pot and brown it in a little olive oil
• Once that’s going, dump your veg in over it
• Stick in the wine, passata, sauce and stock
• Top up the pot with some boiling water, not to full or it will boil over at it gets going (made that mistake today…doh)
• Stick the lid on and then bring it to simmer/boil slowly
• Once it’s “ticking” away, just turn it down so that it keeps simmering away
• Cook for as long as you can, at least 3-4 hours (overnight is perfect)
• After about 2 hours give it a stir to make sure all the veg is cooking through
• You can leave the lid off towards the end if you need the stew to thicken a bit