You can refrigerate the salsa overnight to reduce some of the jalapeno’s heat, if you like, or reduce the amount.

Fresh rosemary and lemon brighten mild, nutty chickpeas. Dip with pita wedges or endive leaves. For a quick lunch, try this in pita bread with sliced cucumbers and tomatoes. Or thin with a little vegetable broth to make an easy soup.

Inspired by traditional African recipes, this delicious stew gets its richness from sweet potatoes and natural peanut butter. While the peanut butter contributes a lot of flavor, it also contributes a good bit of fat. To reduce the fat, you may choose to reduce the amount or leave it out entirely. If you follow the Eat to Live program, you may want to substitute a raw nut butter.

Hummus is a Middle Eastern dip or spread. There are lots of recipes for it, each with a different proportion of ingredients. Over the years I’ve worked on mine to make it much lower in fat than the original version. If you want to make it truly fat-free, omit the tahini and increase the seasonings. You may also add one of the optional ingredients noted at the end of the recipe.

I have been making a lot of lentil dishes lately, because they are cheap and easy and do not require soaking.

HELPFUL HINTS: This is a very spicy soup. Use less Tabasco and less coriander if you prefer your foods less spicy.

Recipe By :Vegetarian Times Complete Thanksgiving Cookbook

When I use salsa as a dressing, I make a yummy black bean dip and put it on the bottom of the plate and then add my salad and then the salsa. The bean dip gives it a yummy taste. Here’s what I do:

This delicious soup is a nutritional powerhouse! And, it’s so tasty that I have no trouble getting my 8-year-old to eat her vegetables when they’re prepared this way.

Yields 10 3-ounce popsicles.

I combined recipes from two classic vegetarian cookbooks, Laurel’s Kitchen and American Wholefoods Cuisine, to come up with this essential cold-weather soup. It can be made very quickly if you use a food processor to chop the vegetables (excluding potato) and cook it in a pressure cooker.

This soup is cooked in two stages so the split peas develop a creamy consistency but the sweet potatoes and shallots retain their texture. If you don’t have shallots, red onions work fine.

I got this recipe from a friend I met at Weight Watchers. It’s easy to make (basically just opening cans!) and tastes really good. Nice and warming on these cold winter days. It does make quite a bit though – I ate it practically every day for a week – so unless your family will eat it too, you might want to freeze some of it. There are 1 1/2 points per cup serving. –Miriam

This recipe makes a Texas-sized amount of salsa, so halve it if necessary.

Harrisa (also spelled harissa) is a Tunisian hot pepper sauce. I buy the Ziyad brand in a local Middle Eastern grocery store. If you can’t find harrisa, feel free to use any other spicy pepper sauce you have on hand. I started with a teaspoon of sauce and kept adding until it reached the spiciness we like, probably about 2 teaspoons.