Dinner #25 - A Night of Ricotta

December is always a very crazy month and the same definitely applies for Worth Kitchen. In the past two weeks we have had 3 dinners, two of which have been filmed. We are planning our first dinner for 18 people this Thursday at a beautiful loft in SoHo. So our plans do not stop... but lets not get ahead of ourselves. We still need to go back to Thursday December 2nd, our 25th dinner.

The dinner of the ricotta. Delicious dishes, and my first braised short ribs of the winter. This is a dish that will make various repeats in the future.

The menu was the following:
Appetizer
Baked beets and ricotta with rosemary and truffle salt


Entree
Braised short ribs with a merlot and broth reduction on a bed of ricotta polenta

Dessert
Ricotta cheesecake

The baked beet slices with ricotta. A little amount of beet juice was poured on top of the cheese to give it a desired coloring. Experimenting with the presentation is one of the key take aways from these dinners. Sometimes its a hit, sometimes its a miss. You be the judge.

The short ribs were seared before putting them to braise for 4 hours in a chicken broth with leeks, carrots, celery, rosemary and a bottle of merlot. By end of the braise we had a delicious broth that when filtered and reduced to a perfect sauce. The polenta with ricotta was served a long with some chanterelle mushrooms

The ricotta cheesecake was very simple yet indulging. My first cheesecake ever and I think it came  out quite well. It was missing the orange zest, it could have given it an additional flavor bump. But for first time with a cheesecake, I was very pleased. 

After this dinner I had a lot of short ribs and polenta left over. So instead of keeping it around for a personal dinner or lunch, I took the everything to the office and prepared short rib tacos and ricotta cheesecake for anyone that was around. This was officially our first of what could be many more Thursday Left Overs.  Many were feed and all were happy.