Oven-Roasted Cod with Spicy Tomato Marmalade and Tahini (for a crowd!)

Plus: Toasted Farro Salad, Rosemary Orange Olive Oil Cake, and John Birdsall on Lunch Therapy.

Hey everyone,

I had an assignment this Saturday which was to cook a dinner for six friends with the following restrictions: no meat, no dairy, no eggplant, no strawberries, and no bananas. Now some people might feel inhibited by such dietary requirements, but I kind of feel the opposite: just like how it’s easier to write something with limitations (two people stuck in an elevator, for example) than it is just to write anything. So what did I cook up?

You’ll find out after this brief message from our sponsor: me! Hi, I’m Adam Roberts from the Lunch Therapy podcast and this week we have James Beard Award winner and James Beard biographer John Birdsall on the Lunch Therapy couch.

It’s a moving session, where John talks about being a gay chef in San Francisco in the nineties, how the AIDS crisis played out in restaurants (including Jeremiah Tower’s decision to fire a waiter with visible lesions), and what it was like working at Deborah Madison’s Greens which was located in the San Francisco Zen Center. (A totally quiet restaurant kitchen? Yes, that was real.) You can listen to the whole thing here or wherever you listen to podcasts:

Now let’s talk dinner party, including the full recipes (!) for the roasted cod and the farro salad that I made….