I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world. Mastodon Verification Link	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he migrated to the Fediverse. He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance. He hates cell-phones.

I do love oxtails; they're full of flavor and appealing of texture. Picking them off the bone can be rather annoying, though, so my solution is usually to stew them until they are essentially falling off the bone, and then help the process along.

Stewed Oxtails

• 3 carrots
• 1 potato
• 1 onion
• 1 small rutabaga or part of a larger one
• 2 lbs of oxtails
• salt and pepper
• 2 cups of stock
• 1 tsp smoked paprika
• 1 Tbs flour

Upon your return, the oxtails should fall off the bone with hardly any encouragement. If they don't, go away for a while longer. If they do, then pull them out of the crock pot and give them that little bit of encouragement. Return the meat to the pot, add the paprika, stir and then go away for another ten minutes or so.

When you return, the fat should have risen to the top of the crock pot. Now, you could skim it at this point, but that seems a shame on two counts. First, you're losing all that lovely, tasty fat. Second, you'll still need to thicken the stew. Instead of skimming, sprinkle the flour across the top of the floating fat and gently mix it with back of a spoon. When the flour is mixed with the fat, you have something which will work like a buerre-manié, so then stir it into the pot and let it go for another half-hour or so to thicken.

Correct the seasonings and serve. Or just serve and let people add a bit of salt themselves, if they want.

(For those of you who have been reading along, I don't really recommend using headcheese jus for this application. Something in a bit more of a neutral broth would be better.)