If you want to run a recipe against a list of nodes from one source, you'll likely need to use an orchestration tool to assist in running/auditing these operations.
I can personally vouch for rundeck. You'll need to do a bit of legwork to get rundeck to be able to ssh into each of your nodes, but once you've set it up it isn't difficult to create a rundeck job that runs chef-solo/chef-zero on any subset of those nodes you want it to.