There’s still time to make that flourless chocolate cake for someone special. Hector insists.

But since I am the there-WILL-be-flowers-and-jewelry-and-a-big-deal-made-out-of-this-made-up-holiday kind of girl, I feel like I should get my husband something. But usually, what I come up with is something a girl would want. Framed photos? That’s a chick gift. Lame.

This year, though, I think I actually got it right: A batch of homemade biscotti. My husband loves coffee. He loves sweet things to dunk in his coffee even more. Ah-ha! Espresso-flavored biscotti it was.

I wish I could tell you that I packaged these up in a spiffy new mug with a pretty Valentine ribbon, but I didn’t. I put them in a container he can easily take with him to work. He’s pretty easy to please.

And even though I’ve scheduled this to post late in the afternoon of Feb. 13, you can still make biscotti for your Valentine, too. It’s unbelievably easy and you almost certainly have the ingredients on hand!

Espresso and almond biscotti

From Food Network

• 2 cupsall-purpose flour
• 2 tablespoons ground espresso powder
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 3 large eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 3/4 cup sliced almonds (optional)

Preheat oven to 350 F and line a baking sheet with parchment paper, a liner or nonstick spray and flour. (My Silpat has been a game changer, to say the least.)

In the bowl of a stand mixer, whisk together flour, espresso powder, cinnamon, baking soda, baking powder, sugar and salt.

In another bowl, beat together the eggs and vanilla.

Using the paddle attachment, beat the egg mixture into the dry ingredients until a dough forms. Fold in the almonds.

On a floured work area, form the dough into a ball and then cut it into two logs, about 3 or 4 inches wide and 12 inches long.(Some biscotti recipes say the dough spreads; mine didn’t, and I wish I had spread out more.)

Bake the logs for about 35 to 40 minutes, until browned and firmed. Take them out of the oven and let them cool for a few minutes. Move back to the floured surface and cut them into pieces about a half-inch thick. Bake the biscotti another six to 10 minutes, until crisp.

I made this cake from Food Network this weekend to celebrate Valentine’s Day with my husband. I had never worked with meringue before, and as you can see, it got a little too toasty, but other than that, I was really pleased with it. I foresee many more meringue experiments in my future.

Honestly, sometimes I feel a little weird posting these fun recipes. This is a blog that was started because I wanted to write about losing weight and be all, like, “Look at me! I lost 100 pounds!” But the truth is that I never thought much about food before I lost weight, and I certainly never would have gone on the hunt for a special recipe to celebrate Valentine’s Day.

I think that if I had to explain it to my former self, I would say, “100 pounds is the difference between a slice or two of this cake on Valentine’s Day versus dozens of those heart-shaped Little Debbies snack cakes that come out as soon as the Christmas tree-shaped brownies disappear.”

Flourless chocolate stout cake with vanilla meringue

From Food Network

For the cake

• 2 1/2 sticks unsalted butter, cut into pieces
• 1 1/4 cups chocolate chips
• 6 large eggs
• 3/4 cup turbinado sugar
• Pinch of salt
• 1/2 cup Guinness or other stout beer
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 325 and spray a springform pan with a nonstick baking spray. I use Wilton’s Bake Easy.

Bring a small sauce pan of water to a simmer. Crack the six eggs, turbinado sugar and salt in the bowl of a stand mixer. Whisk together over the simmering water until the mixture is warm through.

Put the bowl on the mixer, and, using the whisk attachment, beat on medium-high speed for five to seven minutes. While the mixer’s going, bring the beer and vanilla to a low boil; beat into the egg and sugar mixture.

While the beer’s boiling, melt the chocolate in the microwave. (Heat in 30-second increments until melted.)

Beat in the butter pieces and finally, the chocolate.

Pour into prepared springform pan and bake about 40 minutes until set in the center. Don’t be worried if it doesn’t seem entirely done; it will set up quite a bit as it cools.

Meringue

• 4 room temperature egg whites
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar

Using a stand mixer, beat egg whites with whisk attachment, slowly streaming in cream of tartar, vanilla and sugar, until stiff glossy peaks form.

Use an offset spatula to arrange the meringue on the cake, making swirls and peaks throughout. You can use a culinary torch to toast the meringue or pop it under the broiler at 500 degrees for a few minutes, but if you do that, be very careful. I sat cross-legged on the kitchen floor staring into my oven and was about 10 seconds too late in removing our cake. Time to buy the lighter fluid for the culinary torch I received at my bridal shower … almost a year ago.

What special sweet treat are you making for Valentine’s Day?

I haven’t ordered that in a long time, but the last time I did, the predominant flavor was salt. And grease. Not really worth the calories (or the money). I had a brief fling with that creamy jarred spinach dip that Tostito’s makes, but it was one of those bad-for-you foods that just sort of faded into a distant memory at some point. (Unlike frozen pizza, which still makes an occasional appearance.)

I decided to make a health-ified spinach dip for the Super Bowl, using Natalie’s Feta Dip as a base. I didn’t get to take a photo, but trust me, it’s as easy and good as it sounds. I have never had a problem substituting Greek yogurt for mayo or sour cream, and this dip was no exception.

Healthy spinach dip

• 8 ounces crumbled feta
• 3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
• 1/2 tablespoon bottled minced garlic (that’s a lot, if you’re not a garlic lover, scale it back)
• 10-ounce package frozen chopped spinach, thawed and squeezed dry
• 1 tablespoon Greek seasoning
• 1 6-ounce container lowfat plain Greek yogurt
• 2/3 cup Italian shredded cheese (usually some combination of parmesan, mozzarella, etc), plus more for broiling (optional)

Preheat oven to 350 F.

Puree the crumbled feta, garlic and EVOO in a food processor until smooth and creamy. Transfer to a mixing bowl and mix in spinach, Greek seasoning, Greek yogurt and shredded cheese. Mix well, and transfer to a small baking dish. Bake at 350 for 30 minutes, until it bubbles at the edges. Top with extra cheese and broil for a few minutes until golden brown.

My next move was so dumb it probably shouldn’t be written on the Internet, but here I am. I whisked all of the ingredients together and then brushed it on the pork chops after pan searing them, figuring it might be OK.

Well … it was OK. But really just OK. I figured it would be taste a lot better if I actually followed the directions, so I added a pork loin roast to our grocery list.

It was beautiful. And delicious.

Brown sugar and balsamic glazed pork roast

Ingredients

• A 2 pound boneless pork roast
• Dried cilantro, salt, pepper, garlic (all to taste)
• 1/2 cup water

For the glaze

• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1 tablespoon cornstarch
• 1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
• 1/2 cup water
• 2 tablespoons soy sauce

In a small bowl, combine the sage, salt, pepper and garlic. Rub the mixture all over the roast; put it in the slow cooker with the 1/2 cup of water. Cook on low for 6 to 8 hours. (Keep an eye on it if you can; all slow cookers are different and mine cooks like it’s on speed, even when it’s filled to capacity.)

An hour before dinner, combine all of the glaze ingredients in a small sauce pan and whisk until it thickens. Brush on the roast while it finishes.

A self-inflicted problem at that. I saw cinnamon M&Ms on a clearance end cap at Target and could. not. help. myself. I mean, cinnamon M&Ms? What are those? I had never heard of such a thing and had to know more. Plus, they were 90 cents. If they were terrible (unlikely) I could pitch them and little would be lost.

I don’t know about you, but I think Green is pretty chic in the snow bunny look.

The Biscoff spread, well, that’s a whole other story. I saw a jar of cookie butter from Trader Joe’s on Instagram and immediately pleaded on Facebook for someone to send me some. My friend Elin, being as amazing as she is, sent me a delicious care package from TJ’s that included the cookie butter, cocoa almond spread and a chocolate and coffee grinder that will be the perfect topping for the coffee cupcakes I still haven’t made.

My other amazing friend Kim also saw the post and didn’t say anything … but came to visit right before Christmas bearing a horseshoe necklace (“Your version of the Carrie necklace!” she told me, and I totally squealed) and, you guessed it, Biscoff spread.

I didn’t open the Biscoff spread right away, because we still had the cookie butter. We devoured the cookie butter far sooner than I’d care to admit and dove head first into the Biscoff, and when I came home looking forward to a spoonful, I knew things had gone too far. I was also pretty close to tearing into the M&Ms, for the simple reason that they were in my house, so they needed to go, too.

The thing is, if it’s a cookie or a cupcake, I can usually shut myself off. I know when I’ve had just enough and it’s time to call it a night. But with individual ingredients, I’m done for. I will eat small handfuls of chocolate chips until the entire bag is gone. Clearly I should have acted sooner, as I had exactly one-half cup of Biscoff spread left — just enough to make these Biscoff oatmeal cookies from Two Peas and Their Pod that I found via Table For Two.

Biscoff oatmeal cookies with cinnamon M&Ms

• 1 1/2 cups old fashioned oats
• 1/2 cup plus 2 tbsps all purpose flour (I used whole wheat pastry flour in an attempt to get rid of it and it was fine)
• 1/2 tsp. baking soda
• 1 tsp. ground cinnamon
• 1/8 tsp. salt
• 1/2 cup of unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1/2 cup Biscoff spread
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1/2 cup light brown sugar
• 1 large egg
• 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
• As many cinnamon M&Ms as you can fold in into the dough.

Whisk together the dry ingredients in a bowl and set aside.

Using a stand or hand mixer, beat together the butter, Biscoff and sugars until fluffy; add the egg and vanilla and beat until blended.

Gradually beat in (on low) the dry ingredients, mixing just until combined. Carefully fold in those limited edition M&Ms. Refrigerate the dough for about 30 minutes; during this time you can preheat the oven to 350 F and line baking sheets with parchment or wax paper or silicone mats.

Bake for eight to 10 minutes, until they are just firm around the edges. Allow them to continue to firm up on the baking sheet for at least five minutes, then move to a wire rack.

I like meatloaf. Since I started cooking I’ve tried a couple different recipes, a couple Crock Pot varieties … but none ever tasted like classic meatloaf, ketchup glaze and all. It seems like when I make it in a loaf pan, half of the thing is lost to the grease on the bottom of the pan, and the rest of sticks to the pan, and it’s just a hideous mess.

Meatloaf muffins, thankfully, are not a hideous mess. And two of them are a serving, so there’s no hacking at a loaf and hoping you got the right amount. And just like its full-size friend, it tastes way better the next day.

Meatloaf muffins

From Cooking Light

Ingredients

• 1.25 to 1.5 pounds of lean ground beef
• 2 eggs
• 1 onion, diced
• 1 cup diced carrot
• 1 teaspoon oregano
• Minced garlic to taste
• 1 cup Italian seasoned breadcrumbs
• 1 cup ketchup
• 2 tablespoons yellow mustard
• 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

Preheat the oven to 350 and coat a 12-muffin tin with nonstick spray.

Mix the carrots, onions and oregano together and sauté in olive oil; set aside to cool.

Mix the beef, eggs, breadcrumbs and remaining ingredients together, adding in the onion mixture when cool.

Scoop the meatloaf mixture into the muffin pan. My muffin cups were filled above the brim.

Bake at 350 until a meat thermometer reads 160 — this took about 35 minutes for me.

There is more to this cupcake than meets the eye.

It is a cookie-bottomed cupcake! An idea stolen from How Sweet Eats.

I don’t want to get all “the possibilities are endless!!” on you, but they kind of are. How Sweet Eats also features a snicker doodle cookie cupcake.

For the cupcake above I used the chocolate chip cookie recipe from How Sweet Eats. The cupcake portion is from a boxed chocolate cake mix, and the frosting is salted caramel buttercream. I cheated on that, too — I made my basic buttercream by beating together two cups of powdered sugar and two sticks of butter, then adding jarred caramel sauce (the horror!)  until the flavor and consistency were just right. I added a couple pinches of salt, but next time, I’d add more so the salt was more obvious.

I think recipe will be fun to play with for holidays and events — it’s a crowd pleaser for sure, and it’s so straight forward that experimenting is easy.

What kind of cookie bottomed cupcake combo are you dreaming up?

I know that thinking about yourself in the third person like that is really narcissistic and all I can say is that losing 100 pounds will do that to you.

But I think about what my 300-pound self would think. She’d see that going blonde was a really great idea and probably not waste a year thinking about it. She’d also be kinda disappointed to learn that even more than 100 pounds lighter, her future self is still kinda chunky, not rail thin like she’d have thought. I know she’d be thrilled to learn that not only will she eventually get married, she won’t be a fat bride.

I know what I would tell my old self. I would tell her that watching her body transform through a 100-plus-pound weight loss will be more fascinating and satisfying than she could ever imagine. There’s a lot of stuff I wouldn’t even bother with because she’ll just have to figure it out as she goes, but there are two things I would get down on my knees and beg of her.

The first is simple: Start strength training from the very beginning. Pick up some dumbbells the first time you ever go to a gym. It will make a huge difference, and she shouldn’t have to wait several years to figure that out.

The second is a little bit more complicated: Don’t ever start running. And I mean it.

That might sound a bit odd coming from someone who was just bragging up her first half marathon two months ago. But that runner’s high wore off pretty quick, and I was left with a medal and 10 or 15 extra pounds and wondering why in the hell I ever thought that was a good idea.

Here’s the deal with running: It doesn’t make everyone ravenous or send them on a carb bender. It does have that effect on some people. I am one of those people. The weight I gain running is not muscle. It is fat, because running makes me  so hungry that I eat more than I burn.

I started running in 2009, and the last major change I saw in my body was in 2009. I don’t think those two facts are entirely unrelated. I did drop some weight between December 2010 and July 2011, when I stopped running and focused on strength training. It cost me more than $200 in wedding dress alterations. The seamstress’ gushing over how big my dress was was easily worth 10 times that much.

After the half marathon, I would pull out my medal and look at the sparkly details, glittering like fool’s gold, which for me, it actually was. Then I would look at the lumps and rolls of fat that had reappeared and couldn’t help but think of that 1990s safe-sex tagline that said something along the lines of “A few seconds of pleasure aren’t worth a lifetime of pain.”

And I know that my old self wouldn’t believe me. She’d think that running 13.1 miles sounds like an amazing accomplishment and not understand how her future self can think a 12:30 pace is an embarrassment when she couldn’t even complete one mile in less than 17 or 18 minutes when forced to “run the mile” in high school gym class.

But I would insist. I would assure her that fitting into a smaller size trumps crossing the finish line, it really does. Take up Pilates, I’d plead. You’ll love Spinning, I’d tell her — get up the nerve to go to a class sooner. Spend the money you would have spent on races on cute fitness clothes. You’ll look better in them if you don’t ever start running.

I’ve lost most of the weight I gained training for and running the half marathon. What I didn’t know when I set out to do it is that my life would have been 100 percent complete without the experience. I also know that I’d have always wondered about it if I’d never done it.

That’s why my current and former selves need to meet. They could learn a lot from each other.

I no longer get excited by subject lines promising me quick, healthy, delicious, inexpensive weeknight dinner recipes. Most of the time it’s either a combination of flavors and textures that just doesn’t sit well with me, even on a computer screen, or it’s carb based.

When Martha Stewart’s Everyday Food daily email arrived last week and the teaser shot was of chicken ricotta meatballs, I was intrigued. I clicked through. I held my breath. And it was something I’d actually consider making!

(Carb-based. Oops.)

I can’t really do a better job of telling you how to make chicken ricotta meatballs than Martha did, but I can tell you that if I had those 20 minutes of my life to live over I would definitely brown the meatballs in a skillet before throwing them into the broth. Oh, and I used a ton of Greek seasoning in both the meatballs and the broth, and I added pasta at the last minute, and I’m not usually a big pasta fan, but in this instance it totally worked.

One of the biggest challenges for me when it comes to cooking and planning meals is finding the right recipes. The right recipe for me is not carb based, is easy to put together, doesn’t have a ton of ingredients, and in an ideal world can  be made ahead of time and reheated. This soup was the easiest thing in the world to throw together on a Sunday night. The thing is, I like to cook; I just don’t always like to do it on a weeknight.

With my initiative to cook more this year, I’ve been trying to browse the web for recipes a little bit each night, instead of waiting until right before I need to go grocery shopping. I have a “meal planning” bookmark folder, and let me tell you, it’s a small change that’s already helped me in a big way.

I’d like to start digging through cookbooks more often to find ideas. I often lust after cookbooks in bookstores (ooh, those shiny pages and colorful photos …) but can’t bring myself to spend $10 or $20 on a cookbook when I might only ever use a few recipes. I had a subscription to Everyday Food because it came free with my Martha Stewart Weddings subscription last year, and I think I might renew it and also subscribe to Cooking Light and Food Network magazine. I had a Rachel Ray subscription but I don’t think her magazine is for me because I spend too much wondering how anyone who eats that many carbs stays so thin.

What cookbooks do you have? What magazines do you recommend? Where do you find your meals?