I had a tasty oxtail stew from a take-out place the other day and was going to write about it.  Sadly since I was vomiting for much of that evening, I don't think I will recommend it. Nor will I name and shame since I can't definitively prove it was them and not some Christmas leftovers, though my money is firmly not on anything in my fridge.

This certainly won't put me off oxtail in general though, absolutely not.  I think its sad, now that we live in a world that rightly thinks about food miles and the amount of methane that cows fart into the ozone layer, that people in general are still wary of lesser known cuts of meat (lets not even start on offal).  There are many compelling arguments for eating less meat from an environmental perspective, but too few people argue for eating all the different bits of the animals that are killed.  This would mean farmers could make the same living breeding less animals.  After all everyone is happy to eat cow's arse as long as it's in burger form, no matter how much methane's gone through it, so why not oxtail, shin, flank and all the other good stuff.  This isn't so much the case with restaurants.  St John's made offal and off cuts fashionable here, and chefs have always been happy t charge £12 (if your lucky) for a lamb shank that would have cost them a pound at most.  The problem is that people don't cook with them at home enough, and that means the market isn't there for the supermarkets who are the key players in this to stock them.  So in short ask for breast of lamb to be supplied by your local Sainsbury's and don't eat in places that don't reheat their rice properly.  If you do this the world will be healthier and you won't have to be sick everywhere.