Cookout Time!

It’s Labor Day weekend and for lots of us, that means grilling out with friends and family. Our family grills out a lot over the summer. The same menu of hamburgers, hot dogs and potato salad starts to get old after a while (not to mention full of fat and calories), but it can be tricky finding recipes for grilled food that an assortment of people and their families will eat and that are healthy.

Here’s a menu that is different from your average cookout, a definite crowd-pleaser and easy to put together. And the whole thing comes in at less than 600 calories, not bad for a holiday cookout! The chicken and watermelon salad recipes each make 4 servings but you can double or triple them without any problems. You can make the chicken marinade and the rice and bean salad the night before. You can cut up the watermelon in advance, but wait until an hour before serving to mix with the feta, otherwise the salad will be too juicy. You can serve plain watermelon slices to the kids instead of the watermelon salad.

One note about the sodium content: the actual sodium you are eating is going to be less than the 1320mg listed (remember, try to stay around 2000mg per day). This is because the majority of the sodium comes from the soy sauce in the chicken marinade. The nutritional analysis takes into account the entire quantity of the marinade, but you are not eating all of the marinade and are discarding it after the chicken soaks.

Here’s the menu:

• Grilled Peruvian Chicken
• Black Bean and Rice Salad
• Watermelon, Feta and Mint Salad

And here’s the stats: