SPOTLIGHT ON…
	Grill Your Salad?

If you love to barbecue, but worry about health hazards, here’s the answer: grill a small amount of meat carefully and fill out the rest of the rack with vegetables and even fruits. Or how about lettuce?

Grilling lettuce actually works well to bring out its flavor. Ditto for other salad veggies – like tomatoes, bell peppers, mushrooms, onions and summer squash. A large percentage of vegetables – at least 2/3 of your meal – can balance out the meat in a meal, which shouldn’t be more than 1/3 of the total. AICR advises limiting red meat to 18 ounces (cooked weight) per week for cancer prevention and good health.

Using a lean cut of meat limits calories and helps avoid the flare-ups and smoke during grilling caused by fat dripping onto the coals. Flare-ups cause charring, which contains toxic substances. Smoke deposits potentially toxic substances onto meat, poultry and seafood.

Marinating the meat makes those risky substances less apt to form, studies show. Flank steak is long and thin, so it absorbs marinades more quickly than thicker cuts and cooks quickly. To avoid food-borne illness don’t re-use any marinade that raw meat has touched.

For the salad featured in this issue, you can set aside 2/3 of the Asian-accented marinade to use as dressing and then put the other 1/3 on the meat. At the end, you’ll have sliced warm steak over a colorful, crisp salad accented with mango, chile peppers, cilantro and a zingy honey-lime dressing.

See: Grilled Steak Salad recipe