New York Times, Wednesday, July 30, 2014

This was a fun theme for me. Shortly after submitting my PESTO recipe puzzle two years ago, I decided to continue to follow the advice "write about what you know" — so another cooking theme. I remember standing in the middle of the kitchen looking at various items and calling out humorous definitions to my husband. It didn't take too long to come up with a theme-worthy list. What took much longer, and several revisions, was getting it all into a decent puzzle. Thanks to Will for his advice and final tweaking of the fill. Hope you have as much fun as I did.

Wacky interpretations of normal kitchen items today, for example COOKIE SHEET being clued to tracking cookies on a web browser. I particularly enjoyed MICROWAVE, evoking an image of a teeny-tiny surfer catching a teeny-tiny wave. CAN OPENER was fun too, with the "jail" definition of CAN being employed. Good stuff.

Isn't there a real thing as a MEASURING CUP when it comes to undergarments? I got slightly confused when I hit this one, wondering if I hadn't grokked the theme as I had thought. I assumed this was an actual thing, no? Like a muffin tin with cups of different depth?

It's amazing that anyone ever takes me seriously.

Anyhoo, Jean packs in six themers, a very difficult task. Look at how much overlap there is in between adjacent themers. I'm quite impressed that she made the NE corner work, for example, as any time you have an overlap of six letters (the RINSEO of RINSEOFF sandwiched in between COOKIE SHEET and MEASURING CUP), you're bound to have some trouble. It's often difficult to find a word that slips in between while providing you smooth fill. But both this corner and the opposite one come out pretty clean. Well done there; great use of cheater squares (above SHOP AT and below DECAFS) to smooth things out.

I admire the usage of two long downs. TV CHANNELS and especially GETAWAY CAR are beautiful answers which add a lot of spice to the puzzle. They do add a lot of constraints though, and the roughest parts of the puzzle fall within those regions. The west is pretty good with just AVEO and our old crossword friend ISAO Aoki popping up, but that east section felt pretty crunchy with STELA, ELEV and the Scrabbly but esoteric SAXE all crammed together. It's a reasonable tradeoff to get the nice long entries. I wonder if another set of cheater squares could have helped.

All in all, a fun solve. Humor is subjective (ask my poor wife) but many of these themers brought me a chuckle.