Once again, I’ve received way too many books from the library, so I’ve been reading like a fiend to tackle them all before they’re due. I’m grouping the sci-fi here, and the fluffy stuff will be in another post. So, onward!

Old Man’s War by John Scalzi: As you may recall from a previous post, I’ve read a couple of John Scalzi’s books and enjoyed them. But those were the more lighthearted books; I wasn’t sure I would be as delighted with the heavier material, namely the four books in the Old Man’s War series. But like his stuff I do, so read this book I did. And I was silly to be worried — this book was just as excellent as the lighter stuff. He’s created a fascinating universe, where humans can volunteer for the colonial defense (a badass space army) at age 75. They’re made physically fit, trained, and sent out to fight pretty much every other race in the universe. It’s almost, dare I say it, an Ender’s Game for the senior set. Scalzi has taken the sci-fi trope of training-space-soldiers and put a very cool twist on it. In full disclosure, Scott is reading this book right now, and said, “This lead characer, John, is kind of a Mary Sue, isn’t he?” I didn’t feel that, but there it is. 8 out of 10.

The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi: I was going to read the latest Nick Hornby book, but then this arrived on my doorstep, and poor Nick got bumped. It’s the second book in the Old Man’s War series, set in the same universe with a couple of the same characters. But a much different angle; more of a mystery combined with sci-fi war and adventure. And again, it was a really enjoyable read. (I’ve put the third book in the series in my request queue.) Three alien races are coming together to attempt to wipe out humankind, and a human traitor is behind it. The special forces (also called the titular ghost brigades) are tasked with finding out where the traitor is, and what his plans are. The story moved along at a great clip, and the ending gave just a glimpse into the possible content of the next book, which I can’t wait to receive. 8 out of 10.

Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card: I enjoyed Ender’s Game immensely, so I promptly requested the second book in the series. It took a very long time to get to me; the line of library requests was oddly long. And I’ll say this right off the bat: this book is incredibly different from Ender’s Game. And at first, I had a really hard time getting into it. While the first book was about children learning to be soldiers, this book starts out about biologists studying an alien race. Eventually Ender himself enters the scene, and the book comes together not as a war book, but as a sci-fi murder mystery. Once I finally realized how completely opposite this book was, I got a lot more into it. I wish I’d known in advance that it was nothing like Ender’s Game — it might have taken less time for me to settle in. For me, then, the back half of the book really took off and got interesting. My biggest issue overall is that most of the characters had given names and nicknames, and a lot of their nicknames were similar. I spent a lot of time thinking, Wait, now who was that again? Card also pretty plainly telegraphed what the sequel would be about, and even led me to guess about some of the relationships that would develop. We’ll see if they come about the way I think; I’ve put book 3, Xenocide, on the hold list. 7 out of 10.

I love spagetty squash. Likewise spaghetti squash.

I’ve given our local farmers’ market three tries now. And it’s three strikes.

When I think of a “farmers’ market”, I think of fresh, local foods. Produce, meats, dairy. And I know there are tons of these things around; the grocery stores frequently carry local fruits, and there are cattle grazing on pasture not five minutes from my apartment in pretty much any direction.

Maybe my expectations were too high. I expected, since the sign said “Farmers’ Market”, that there would be more than one actual farmer represented. Unfortunately, there wasn’t even one. This wasn’t even a farmer’s market.

Instead, at least half of the booths were taken up by crafters and artists. There were five booths selling jewelry, although a couple of them appeared to be selling pre-made, mass-produced stuff. One booth had quilts. One booth had windchimes and other decorative clutter. One guy was selling genuine New England maple syrup, which I guess might have been farmed by a farmer at some point, but this guy wasn’t the farmer.

Then there was the produce tent. They had all kinds of fruits and vegetables, but nothing was labeled as local. In fact, almost everything was stickered and bagged as it would be in the grocery stores. Sealed plastic bags of baby carrots, apples with Washington stickers, even the celery in the Green Giant bags (Seattle, you’d be weirded out, as we still are — the celery is branded and always, always sold in plastic bags here).

And instead of looking fresh and vibrant, a goodly amount of the produce looked like it was gathered by dumpster diving behind the supermarkets. Black strawberries, moldy kiwi. And almost everything slightly higher-priced than the exact same stuff at the grocery store down the block.

I envy those of you who can go to your local farmers’ market and get grass-fed beef. Or raw milk and cheese. Or even fruits and vegetables with a little fresh dirt on them, instead of stickers. Maybe there’s another market around here where I can find all of those things, but it’s certainly not the one near me.

I’m enjoying the ongoing coconut flour experiments. This time, I went for a classic: chocolate chip cookies. Please bear in mind, these aren’t specifically low-carb chocolate chip cookies. I used actual sugar and actual chocolate chips in this one. Although if they’re going to just be a treat, and if you’re on maintenance, they can certainly fit into a low-carb lifestyle.

There are two main problems with using the coconut flour. One is that the cookies don’t flatten and spread like wheat flour cookies do. They stayed in virtually the same shapes in which I plopped them on the baking sheets. The other issue is that they don’t get crispy on the edges, which may also be a product of wheat.

Nevertheless, these are good little cookies. They taste like regular chocolate chip cookies, and they have a pretty good texture (although there’s always room for improvement). They’re more soft and crumbly than gooey, which is always the goal for a good CCC.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup butter (1 stick), softened
1/3 cup dark brown sugar
1/3 cup Splenda
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
2 eggs
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
3/4 cup coconut flour
1/4 cup almond meal/flour
2 Tbsp heavy cream
1/2 cup semisweet chocolate chips

Mix the wet stuff, then add the dry stuff in shifts until it’s all combined. Stir in the chips by hand last. (If you’ve ever made CCCs before, this is the standard M.O.) Bake at 400° for 10-12 minutes. Makes 25 cookies.

All right, so. I made this recipe from a combination of various online sources and the classic Toll House recipe on the bag of chips. I used a mix of brown sugar and Splenda, to cut down on some of the carbs. I used dark brown sugar because that’s what was in the house (Scott uses a little bit in his rub when he does baby-back ribs).

The original Toll House recipe calls for baking soda, but the only baking soda in my house is in an open container in the fridge. I don’t think the stuff that absorbs fridge odors should go in the cookies, so I used baking powder instead. One of the ingredients in baking powder is baking soda, so it got in there in a way.

The cream was a last-minute addition, since the batter looked a little thick. I’m glad I added it, and may add a bit more last time to make the cookies even moister. Is moister a word? Well, it is now. Wait, more moist?

Anyhoo. Good flavor, so now future tweaks will include trying to figure out moistness and outer crispitude. And yes, crispitude is definitely a word.

OH, also! Note that one cookie looks more like a Chips Ahoy. You know how when you make CCCs, there’s always the last bit of dough that doesn’t have any chips in it? Yeah, so I just took some chips by hand and studded them in that last sad dough. I think next time, I’ll do that with all of the cookies. It makes them flatter and more uniformly round, gives you a nice even dispersal of chips, and probably uses less chips per cookie than the random stir-in method.

Nutrition: 87 calories / 6.5g fat / 6g carb / 1.5g carbohydrate / 1.5g protein (per cookie, 25-cookie batch)

I’ve been slacking on updating as of late. But it’s not my fault!

Well, it kind of is. I’ve been reading my face off some more. I returned my stack of five big, heavy hardcover library books, and somehow ended up with another stack of five. All of which I need to get through in the three-week borrowing period.

Plus, I’ve been playing a video game. I don’t know how all of you out there are, but when I’m gaming, I’m a collector. I have a need to tackle all of the side missions, gather all of the valuables, and get as many Xbox achievement points as I can.

My current game is The Saboteur, the last game from Pandemic (the guys who also made the Mercenaries games). It’s an open-world sandbox with a main story, several side stories, and freeplay targets up the wazoo. Just one example is that you can collect all of the various cars on the streets. As you can see here, I’ve put together a small assortment of classics. Scott just walked by, looked at this picture, and called me “the Jay Leno of Nazi-occupied France.”

I’ll be at this game for weeks. And when I’m done, a coworker has loaned me Assasin’s Creed 2. Which will then probably occupy my spare time for another month, because achievement points are like Pokemon for me.

Speaking of work:

This was my view walking in yesterday morning. Things are good.

And while I’m moving pictures from my phone to the computer, here’s one from when I was stopped at a traffic light the other day. It sums up some of my issues with Orlando taxicabs.

See, the “Checker Cab” isn’t checkered. And the “Yellow Cab” is orange. And they’re both run by the same company anyway, and have the exact same phone number, so why the different names? Mears, who also runs a lot of buses and shuttles in this town, owns something like the top four cab companies. That’s not to say that others aren’t trying to horn in on popular names; I’ve seen “Chekard Cab” and “Chek-Her Cab” out on the streets.

Also, this town has the slowest taxi drivers I’ve ever seen. Guaranteed to go 5-10 mph under the speed limit, no matter what road you’re on. I thought taxis were supposed to be dangerously fast!

Onward with some fiction! Both of these books are written by John Scalzi, the shiny-new president of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. I was altogether unfamiliar with Scalzi, until Wil Wheaton posted a blog post with a ghastly, horrifying, magically awesome painting, inviting readers to head over to Scalzi’s blog to find out the deets. So scoot over I did, and found John Scalzi to be an intriguing writer.

Since he’s friends with Wil Wheaton, and other friends of Wil Wheaton whom we’ve met have turned out to be really hoopy froods, I scampered over to the library Web site and put a couple of his books on hold.

Agent to the Stars arrived first, and was a great introduction to John Scalzi’s humorous sci-fi writing. A benevolent alien species wants to approach humankind in peace, but they’re smelly. And look like slime. One look at The Blob lets them know that it may not go over well, which leads the aliens to get a Hollywood agent to make the introductions.

I ripped through this book, because I didn’t want to put it down. The characters were fun, the situations clever, and the writing very witty. There were a couple of really glaring typos (which was also the case with the other Scalzi book I read), which is always distressing. And three female characters in the first part whose names start with M, which got a tad bit confusing. But considering that this was Scalzi’s first novel, written partially just to see if he could indeed write, it’s an amazing effort. A load of fun, and 8 out of 10.

The second Scalzi book I received was The Android’s Dream. On a future Earth where alien races are welcomed, a political incident arises when the Nidu species requires a specific genetically created sheep for a ceremony — the Android’s Dream sheep. (A nice nod to Philip K. Dick there.) The only problem is that someone’s killing off any and all of the sheep. Enter Harry Creek, a state department employee with a past both in the army and as a hacker. The perfect combination to find and protect Robin Baker, the only woman with a connection to the sheep needed to prevent interstellar war.

Again, the mix of humor and sci-fi was excellent. And again, I sped through this book in one day, in order to find out what happens. It tickled the same sci-fi funnybone as Douglas Adams — a nice, dry wit. 9 out of 10.

I’ve put my next Scalzi book on hold — The Old Man’s War, which is apparently the first in a set of four (the next are Ghost Brigades, Last Colony, and Zoe’s Tale) more serious books. I hope he still has some of his humor, even if the material is a bit heavier. We’ll have to see if they strike me the same way his lighthearted books have.

I got a number of library books in a very short period of time, so I’ve been reading my face off lately. Our library system delivers requested books right to your doorstep, so it was a surprising few days as my stack grew.

First up: The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. Actually, what I received is what I’ve linked to: the young reader’s edition. Which I kind of like, because it was written with a fun tone that’s easy to understand. Not thick and wordy like that pesky Good Calories, Bad Calories. Anyhoo, in this book Michael Pollan takes us through four meals: one from conventionally available foods, one from organically grown foods, one from a local sustainable farm, and one from foods he hunted and gathered himself. It’s a very nice look at how our foods make it to our local supermarkets, and how foods labeled as “organic” aren’t necessarily any better as far as health OR saving the environment.

The book was a quick read, and would make an excellent companion piece to the documentary Food, Inc. (which also involves Michael Pollan). And even the young reader’s edition contains tons of great information about healthy foods. It made me want to plant a garden. And to visit Polyface Farms (Food, Inc. also made me want to visit Polyface). 8 out of 10.

Next: Twinkie, Deconstructed by Steve Ettlinger. I have to admit, I heard about this book and thought it was going to be great. Ettlinger takes apart the ingredients list of a Twinkie, then finds out how each of those ingredients is grown, processed, or mined. Sadly, the book was a long slog of a read. There wasn’t as much fun as I’d hoped there would be, and it was almost too much information in some ways. The chapters all felt 30% longer than they needed to be.

It was interesting to learn how certain ingredients are created; I was surprised at how many of them were made from petroleum, through cracking and solvents and chemical interactions. Many of the others were made from corn by-products, which are also treated with solvents and chemicals. And in that vein, I think my biggest issue with the book is the fact that the author points out things (Hey, did you know that soy oil is treated with toxic hexane to create shortening?) without a lot of questioning of if these things are good. I guess I wanted a little less here’s-how-it-is, and a little more here’s-what-I-think-about-that. Does Ettlinger think that creating chemical food additives out of petroleum is healthy? Or smart? We don’t really know. He lays out the facts, and not much more. 6 out of 10.