When the entire extended family bombards your home this holiday season, your first reaction might be to shop in bulk, microwave everything and call it a day.

While this may be the easiest way to avoid cooking, you and your family will be missing out on some delicious, healthy dishes that also can be prepared easily. Just in time for this year’s holiday feast, here are some great Web sites for lighter cooking.

The Most Trustworthy
www.anitasrecipes.com
On her very own site, affectionately called “Tried and True,” Anita claims to have personally tasted every recipe and lowered each one’s fat content before making it public. And for those recipes that are clearly higher in fat, Anita marks them well with special warning labels. With this site, you can keep your choices in a virtual recipe box, save your favorites and continue searching by a particular category of cuisine or nutritional detail (such as the amount of protein in the prepared meal).

Fast Solutions
www.mealsforyou.com
This Web site can be the best answer if you’ve got picky eaters or need a specific dish pronto. You can search for keywords, international cuisines (from Cancun to the Pacific Rim) and recipes that exclude specific food allergies. Once you’ve decided on your meal of choice, there is a rundown of calories, fat grams, carbohydrates and dietary exchanges. But perhaps the most impressive feature is the advanced search for prep/cook time, to help you find healthy choices that only take 10 minutes to prepare and 10 minutes to cook, such as Glazed Turkey Pitas (6.6 grams of fat). This site is a great way to find a healthy recipe and a delicious meal that fits into a tight schedule.

Far-Reaching Advice
www.barbosdietkitchen.com
It might take a while to review, but this recipe exchange provides some sumptuous, notable diet dishes, not to mention it’s a great place to start for swapping new health-conscious meal ideas. Here viewers can post their best recipes, including Weight Watchers and those listing dietary exchanges.

Well-Balanced Meals
www.diet.recipes-to-go.com
If you’ve got a hankering for a particular type of food, this Web site provides a breadth of ideas using simple combinations. When you first go to the site, you’ll find every basic food category; for example, “diet beef recipes” is on their list. From there you can click on larger categories of “diet spicy beef recipes” or “diet stir-fry beef recipes” which then leads you to even more choices (“Mexican-Style Meat Loaf” or “Chili Beef Kabobs”). The only downfall with this site is that it does not list nutritional values for the prepared dishes, but their ingredients suggest that they’re on the healthy side.