Half-Local: Penne With Chicken, Asparagus, Mushrooms and Fresh Chevre

It isn’t so hard to eat locally during the winter, that is, if you plan ahead and put food by while it is in season. Canning tomatoes, making jellies, jams and preserves, freezing marinara sauce, pesto and making and canning salsa, and drying and freezing herbs all help families eat the bounty of a local summer while the winter winds blow. Root cellaring, which has become popular again, allows us to eat local potatoes, onions, garlic, squash, pumpkins, turnips, apples and other root vegetables all through the cold season.

But by early spring, most of the stored goodies are gone, and I find myself relying on non-local foods more often, while waiting for the spring-time delicacies to sprout here in Athens County. In March, the blandishments of the Kroger produce aisle work their magic and I find myself buying asparagus from California, a month before it is due to be harvested here in Ohio. And fresh basil, even though there is fresh cilantro I just bought from a local farmer.

Sometimes, I am a bad locavore.

Oh, well. No one should expect to be perfect–just do the best you can for yourself and your family with what you have.

The truth is–the use I put that asparagus and basil to is a good one–most of the other ingredients, except for the penne, lemon juice, Aleppo pepper, olive oil, and the onions, came from local sources. The chicken, chevre, garlic and fresh shiitake were all locally grown and produced, and the chicken stock was made in my kitchen from local chickens and vegetables and frozen months ago.

So I think of this dish as half-local. Which is not bad for Ohio in March.

Now, this recipe could very easily be converted to a vegetarian pasta dish, and with no real loss of flavor. In fact, I think that I would prefer it without the chicken, but Zak and Kat really wanted chicken for dinner last night, so in it went. But, to convert it to a vegetarian pasta, just use tomato-free vegetable broth instead of chicken stock and leave out the chicken. When you saute the mushrooms, toss them in a bit of flour, just as I instruct you to do with the chicken.

The flour serves the purpose with the chicken and giving a dry surface for cooking that will lead to a nicely browned crust, and with mushrooms, it does a little bit of the same thing. But its secondary purpose, that of thickening the sauce, and adding a brown flavor to the sauce, is accomplished just as easily with the mushroom version as it is with the chicken.

As for the fresh basil–you could use another fresh herb in its place, but I am desperately fond of the combination of sweet asparagus and sweet basil–they are so lush when combined together–especially when paired with tart, fresh chevre.

At any rate, here is last night’s dinner, which Kat, Zak and I all loved, and which will probably appear again, in various incarnations, over the next month or so as the local asparagus comes into season.