Last night we had a wonderful springtime - and mostly local - dinner: Grilled chicken with a sauce made with tarragon, chopped garlic scapes, lemon juice and butter; snap peas quickly sauteed in olive oil and sprinkled with a little lemon juice; and jasmine rice.
When I started planning the meal, I was inspired by Jaime at Greengirls to use the garlic scapes in some fashion. At first I thought I would saute them with the snap peas, but that didn't seem right. I poked around epicurious.com for recipes, and found a tarragon sauce that included shallots. I adapted the recipe to what I had on hand, and voila, a nice springtime garden sauce for grilled chicken was born.
I usually don't focus on how local our meals are - I do my best to buy both organic and local ingredients, but don't always - but in this case it was noticeable just how fresh the ingredients were. The grilled chicken was from Kadejan Farms in Glenwood, MN (140 miles away). The snap peas, garlic scapes and tarragon were from the garden (0 miles).
The only non-local item was the jasmine rice, from Thailand. I had originally planned to make wild rice (wild-harvested from Leech Lake, MN, 250 miles away), but it takes too long to cook, and it was getting late. Besides, the nutty jasmine rice was a better compliment to the other flavors in the meal than the heavier wild rice would have been.
All-in-all, a very successful weeknight meal!
Yum! This sounds delicious...I love tarragon and chicken, and I can imagine that the garlic scapes made it just to die for. It's a very pretty meal, as well :-)
Posted by: Colleen | June 14, 2007 at 02:14 PM
Sounds yummy! Maybe this fall I'll manage to plant garlic, although as I'm currently moaning about being out of garden space, I don't know where it will go!
Posted by: Ali | June 14, 2007 at 08:38 PM
Colleen: It was very pretty. If I had added a little chopped up parsley or green onion to the rice, it would've been restaurant-worthy!
Ali: You should give garlic a try! This is my first time, but I'm assuming it's going to be very good - how can it not be?
Posted by: Tracy | June 15, 2007 at 12:09 PM