Do you ever do this? I do this all the time.

I just bought a bunch of ingredients for one meal that I will never, ever use again.

I had gone to Costco, looking to buy a leg of lamb. Costco is my favorite purveyor of lamb, which is actually kind of sad, but it is inexpensive and it is good quality and they always have it.

They didn't have it. But they did have oxtails, which are the culinary equivalent of legs of lamb if you kind of squint and you aren't talking about the taste. So I bought the oxtails.

I had only made oxtails once before, for a story about soul food. That particular recipe was for Southern Smothered Oxtails. The slow-cooked oxtails were great, but the smothered part was a little too gloppy for my taste.

I looked through my collection of cookbooks looking for oxtail recipes that were relatively glop-free. It turns out that although I have a couple of hundred cookbooks, only a handful include recipes for oxtails. And most of those did not inspire me.

I turned to "The New Larousse Gastronomique," the last word on cooking absolutely everything. Naturally, it had a recipe for oxtails. The recipe included this sentence: "Put in a stockpot with 2 pig's trotters, cut into pieces, and a whole pig's ear."

I decided instead to look for an Asian recipe and found a promising one in "Complete Chinese Cookbook" by Ken Hom. The problem was that I did not have several of the ingredients. A bigger problem was that I felt compelled to buy several of those ingredients to make the dish the way Hom intended.

Fortunately, I live near an international market. Unfortunately, that means I could easily buy all these things in jars that I will not possibly use again.

Like red-fermented soybean curd. I went to the store and bought a jar of red-fermented soybean curd. I didn't get the white-fermented soybean curd, because that would be completely wrong, and I didn't get the chili-fermented soybean curd because I wanted my wife to be able to enjoy the oxtails and she doesn't like spicy food.

I also bought a jar of yellow soybean paste, making sure I did not mistakenly purchase dry yellow soybean paste.

Red-fermented soybean curd has a strong but pleasant taste of umami, the full-bodied earthiness found in mushrooms or meat broth. Yellow soybean paste is also basically umami, but with a hint of sweetness to it.

Both are used in many different ways in Chinese cooking, but let's be real: Both are destined to sit unnoticed in the back of the refrigerator until they become crusted over with unidentifiable brown goo and are unceremoniously thrown away.

They weren't particularly expensive, but they weren't free, either.

I needed star anise as well, so I bought a too-large bag of it. But star anise is dried and will remain pungent and flavorful for years. I wouldn't be surprised if I end up eventually using as much as half of the bag, which in some ways is a victory.

I was out of hoisin sauce, which is liberally used in the recipe, so I bought a jar of it, too. Hoisin is vaguely like a barbecue sauce, and I use it often enough that I run out of it, so I didn't end up resenting the fact that I had to buy more.

I had also run out of five-spice powder, but that wasn't a problem because I had the ingredients to make my own (fennel seeds, cloves, Szechuan peppercorns, the star anise I had just bought — all of which I lightly toasted on the stove to bring out their flavor — and cinnamon). Happily, making it myself saved a couple of bucks.

One last ingredient was dark soy sauce. Ordinarily, I would just substitute regular soy sauce for the dark, but I happened to have a jar of dark in my fridge. Honestly, that was an ingredient I figured I would never use more than the one time I originally bought it for, but this is the third or fourth time I've used it.

The oxtails took around three hours to cook, which made them meltingly tender and brought out all of their rich savory flavor. The Asian additions took it well over the top.

It was so good, I may make it again. I mean, I have all of the ingredients.

©2025 STLtoday.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.