Healthy options for the barbie

Salad

This one's a no-brainer. Have a nice salad on the side with your burger or slap some in the bun. To make a simple greek salad, throw some torn-up cos lettuce leafs, olives, cubes of feta, sliced red onion, and lots of big chunks of cucumber and tomato in a large bowl.

Drizzle over a few tablespoons of good olive oil and throw in plenty of thyme before mixing it all together - get stuck in with your hands! You might also want to put some lemon juice and salt in if you have some knocking about or prefer it that way.

Quality meat

Burgers and sausages of dubious content and fatty chicken appendages are generally the meat of choice for barbeques, but quality cuts of beef, pork and chicken breasts are far from wasted on the grill. Particularly when the meat is marinaded and with some hickory chips in the coals.

To make a quick marinade for pork and chicken combine 5 tablespoons of honey, the juice of a lemon, 2-3 tablespoons of soy sauce and 2 whole cloves of garlic. Allow the meat to soak in this marinade for at least 2 hours before grilling, preferably overnight.

Fish

Fish is great on a barbeque and is great at soaking up those wonderful smoky flavours. A quick and easy one to do is trout. Take a whole gutted trout (any type will do) and slash the skin on both sides from top to bottom, roughly ten times each side. Rub olive oil, salt and pepper into both sides (so the skin goes nice and crispy!) and stuff the middle with parsley and lemon.

Put it on the barbeque with a few knobs of butter on top. Don't have it too close to the coals on the barbeque, about 15cm away from very hot coals. It'll take about 6 minutes on each side and the skin will be golden and crispy. Squeeze any left over lemon over it to serve.

Vegetables

Vegetarian options don't have to be limited to veggie burgers and quorn

Vegetarian options don't have to be limited to veggie burgers and quorn, and besides, a meal can still be a meal without meat. Barbeques can of course be used for more than just grilling. With a little tin foil, they're great for steaming vegetables. Make sure you don't use really cheap tin foil as it can be a bit too thin for the intense heat.

Take any steamable veg you've got lying about, (broccoli, pak choi, lettuce, spinach, beansprouts) and wrap them up in foil like a bag (double bag if your foil's thin). Put in a few tablespoons of water before scrunching it up at the top to seal it.

Then just throw it on the grill and forget about it for 10-15 minutes or so (less if you don't have thicker vegetables like brocolli). To serve, I like to just toss them in a little soy sauce but there's any number of things you can do with them. You could also briefly cook off any used marinade to kill any bacteria and pour that over the veg.

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