Here’s a fresh idea from Rachael at Fresh Approach Cooking: Salad dressings that do more than spice up your lettuce leaves. Food from the ‘Hood dressings are made and marketed by the students of Crenshaw High School in an area of Los Angeles that simply ain’t 90210. Proceeds from these condiments help underpriveleged kids pay for college and get a leg up on life.

If you happen to live in Southern California, then just get yourself down to your local Whole Foods and pick up a jar, pronto. And if you are not, not to worry — you can still order up a bottle on Amazon. Rachael even takes it one step further and includes a mushroom recipe that uses the tangy Italian dressing for your next tapas party. Take that, Paul Newman.

Two major rules of successful salad-making:

1. Don’t fatten up your veggies with too much cheese, oily dressings, and other high-calorie add-ins

2. Always keep creative with your ingredients

Thinking outside the lettuce-tomato-cucumber box, Dietgirl offers up one of her favorite Weight Watchers recipes here:

“Grate 4-5 big fat carrots and chop up a wee bunch of coriander (cilantro if you’re American). Throw it all into a bowl with 2 tablespoons of sunflower seeds, 1 tablespoon of pumpkin seeds, a teaspoon of sesame oil, 2 tablespoons of soy sauce and a tablespoon of honey. Mix it all up and eat. Serves 4!”

As Jonathan at Jack Sprat’s Journey points out, “one of the hardest things about eating healthy and maintaining weight is that the cheapest, quickest foods out there tend to be the most unhealthy.” To avoid all those cheap and quick “calorie bombs,” Jonathan recommends doubling up on your food prep: While you’re in the midst of slicing and dicing your way to a salad, cut up twice as many veggies and save the rest for later, thus avoiding the temptation to seek a fast-food fix.

ThisNext loves blogger tips that helps us save triply, helping conserve our precious time, cash, and calories.

ThisNext loves getting smart diet tips straight from the experts, a la dietitian Karen Collins’ salad-centric post at CalorieLab Calorie Counter News. According to a Penn State study, Karen reports, eating a big, low-cal salad before a meal helps keep you from overdoing it on the main course. Go for three cups of greens, carrots, tomato, celery, and cucumber, plus just a splash of reduced-fat dressing.

Since we sometimes forget that there’s a whole world of produce out there beyond what we usually stock in our veggie crisper, it’s good to have health bloggers to open us up to new discoveries. Jicama, which ThirdAge Blog’s Dr. Susan Mitchell describes as “somewhere between a potato and an apple,” packs six grams of fiber and just 50 calories per cup. Dr. Mitchell recommends tossing some jicama into your salad to add more crunch and load up on potassium, magnesium, folate, and vitamin C.