Everyone's a critic.

We arrived, we obsessed, we sampled and tasted and discussed and ate some of those lovely flat Spanish almonds from WholeFoods, and we scribbled furiously.

Our tasting crew included some of the sharpest critics I know. Hey – there’s nothing wrong with having high standards. But they took no prisoners as they sampled the goods. They made a couple of suggestions for improving the methodology, including a four-part fizziness metric (bubble size, quantity, longevity and relative sharp/softness). These will be taken under advisement for future regimens.

And then came the tabulation. Man, do I dread tabulation. And now the results are in:

Trader Joe’s Sparkling Mineral Water wins!

Comments from our illustrious panel for Trader Joe’s included:

• Nothing special.
• Refreshing, thirst-quenching.
• [this space intentionally left blank]
• Tiny happy bubbles.
• Lots of sting/fizz, not enough sparkle. Fuller taste than previous 2.

It might not sound like a strong showing, but we had some pretty polarized reactions to many of the others. Assorted comments include:

• Fizz all bite and no sparkle.
• Almost industrial.
• To be reevaluated.
• Carbonated salt water.
• Needed an almond to cleanse palate.
• Dirty, metallic.
• omg bad.

Well kids, that was fun.

One surprise was that Safeway brand Club Soda tied for 2nd place with San Pelligrino. Testers noted that it had a sweet overtone, without any real mineral flavor. Fine work, Safeway!

So here we are. With a winner in a batch of 10. But we didn’t get to test all of the varieties I wanted to. I really was looking forward to lightly obsessing over some of the restaurant staples: Voss, Saratoga… so we’re likely to do a round II.

Suggestions for how to improve the second round are welcome! As are additional brands to test.

As threatened, we bought a bunch of crazy stuff from American Science & Surplus. Agar, petri dishes, a tiny vacuum cleaner shaped like a pig and a super cool microscope that you plug right into your computer that captures digital images.

Here is some table salt at 400x magnification.

I think this is going to rock my world and take the experiments to a new place. Meanwhile, I’m happy just to create some pretty, pretty pictures.

Feline Maintenance

Also, one of our cats is about to be relieved of some kind of lump on her chest that is either [big fancy word for cancer], or [big fancy word for not cancer]. In advance of the intervention, we took her to the vet today for a pre-op blood test and X-ray to make sure her lump is alone. The vet gave us a guided tour of her anatomy, and I’m working on getting a digital copy of the films. Will share them because I think they’re cool. You can see her heart, lungs, slender little ribs, extra belly padding and next week’s hairball.