meta 0:30
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- 3-down {Food that’s flaky} CROISSANT.
- 4-down {Food beloved by Homer Simpson} DONUT. this is probably not a food that you should eat to get in shape, unless you want your shape to resemble homer’s.
- 16-across {Food that may get sauteed} MUSHROOM.
- 23-across {Food sometimes julienned} CARROT.
- 34-across {Food that hangs on a tree} CANDY CANE. tricky clue! lots of food hangs on trees (pretty much any fruit), but not like this.
- 35-down {Food that may be Sweet & Tangy BBQ-flavored} DORITO.
the title tells us to think about the shape of these foods, and indeed each (kind of) resembles a capital letter: a croissant is similar to a C, a donut is an O, a mushroom often resembles a T, a carrot looks like an I, a candy cane is a J (though not when it’s hanging from a tree), and a dorito… well it’s a triangle. i’d call it a delta, but in our latin alphabet, the closest equivalent is a capital A. putting those together in numerical order given COTIJA, which is itself a food, so that’s our answer. i wonder if anybody arrived at these letters and wasn’t familiar with cotija cheese? even wordpress is highlighting it as a possible misspelling. (then again, it’s doing literally the same with wordpress, which i find frankly hilarious. know thyself!)
anyway, nothing that a quick google couldn’t clear up, although if you put the clues in the usual acrosses-then-downs order you’d get TIJCOA which looks less like a thing (and indeed, isn’t a thing). i feel like the numerical order is more natural when you’re picking particular letters out of the grid, rather than associating answers with other content not directly derived from the grid as we’re doing here.
it’s a relief to get a quick week 1 solve after i missed out on last week’s elegant but brutally difficult week 5. how’d this one land with you all?
Thanks, joon — just 390 correct answers this Week, so a perfect Week…2. Oops!
Cotija isn’t quite cheddar on the familiarity scale, and I looked far and wide for a better A-shaped food than a DORITO, but to no avail. I was in fact lucky tio get COTIJA; don’t have my list in front of me, but there were only I think 7 or 8 legit letter possibilities, even with the only-if-you-really-squint A for DORITO. Surprising there weren’t any good options (that I could find) with even simple shapes like an L, N or D.
D could be grapefruit, which are almost always eaten in halves. And to answer Joon’s question, I arrived at CO_IJ_, decided the dorito must be an A or possibly a Delta, but then I was stuck on the mushroom, which comes in a wide variety of shapes. So I did a search for CO_IJ_ on OneLook, and got cotija. I also did a search for 6 letter foods of various kinds. On Best for Puzzle’s Catalist, which is usually comprehensive, their cheese section doesn’t include cotija.
week 1 so I thought would be a shape but Croissant being a C and Dorito an A are stretches. A rare clinker in my opinion
Well, I don’t have a problem with C for croissant as I was originally thing what word could describe each thing (i.e., what shape are these?).
Most croissants I have seen are arced, so the have a crescent shape.
In the other hand, I can’t think of any mushroom I’ve seen in the grocery store that looks like a T, and 🔺doesn’t look much like an A, either. The rest is gettable, but I’d say if you had no idea such a cheese existed, these might be enough to block the solve.
I needed a few beats to sort out C/U and A/V.
Puzzle #360 immediately came to mind for me. That was one that used themers whose first letter resembled the object (Mountain, Orange, etc.). I’ll always remember that because my 8 year old was the one who solved it when she said “Mountains look like Ms.” I emailed Matt and he put it in the weekly write up.
mgwcc#360 write-up
also:
mgwcc#191 write-up
This part of the write-up for the #360 made me laugh out-loud:
“so we’re looking for one more intersecting pair of answers that can look like their first letters, and it’s there at 30d/43a: SNAKE/BUTTOCKS. i’ll do you the favor of not posting a picture, but how about a clue contest for this entry? i’ll go first: {Asp’s ass?}.”
A gouda, brie-utiful puzzle!
My co-solver had to hold my hand the whole way through, I couldn’t get past looking for shapes in the grid itself, or shapes that could be formed from the first and last letters, shapes related to DIET in the grid, etc. It took me a long time to even see six foods, and MUSHROOM = T and CARROT = I were both almost impossible for me to picture. The crescent shape of the croissant = C and triangle of the Dorito = A were the only ones that were easy for me, the upside-down-ness of the candy cane threw me off too. Luckily we buy cotija for Mexican food all the time!
My solve was similarly difficult.
Perhaps not quite a ‘clinker’, but clearly not his best.
I enjoyed the extra chewiness of this week 1. Found it extremely clever with impressive execution. Once I knew we were looking at letters it took about two seconds to realize a triangle had to be an A.
Found COTIJA downs-only, no-instructions, and googled it to discover that it is a cheese. But almost every short string of letters is something. But it’s a food! But not letter shaped, or shaped in any consistent way, so . . . I had to look at the instructions.
Impressive.
I got the metanism, but got bupkis when I attempted to find a six-letter cheese with a “J” in it. So then I got hung up when a search returned “M” for the shape of a mushroom, even though my first guess was “T”.
For Matt’s amusement (and now maybe yours), I submitted “CAMIJO” which is a pretty neat font I’d never heard of, but, of course, not the intended answer. Not my first flubbed Week 1. And probably won’t be my last.
TFTXWD nonetheless.
nice portmanteau!
I assume you’re referring to “metanism.” Thanks, but no credit for me. It’s commonly used in the XWord Muggles Forum (https://www.xword-muggles.com/index.php).
Both CAMIJO and COTIJA would fit in nicely in one of the many Cheese or font? quizzes.
nearly missed DORITO, leaving just COTIJ, which sounds like COTTAGE cheese!
I thought the Dorito was a wedge of cheese 🧀.
Had COTIJD for the longest time & needed a nudge from a solving buddy to tell me the Dorito was supposed to be an A instead of a D. Also hurt that I’d never heard of Cotija cheese in my life. Even typing it in this comment field has a red dotted line under it because it doesn’t recognize it as a correctly spelled word. I started to think maybe Matt was trying to get a phonetic spelling of Cottage cheese? And I wasn’t 100% on the mushroom being a T either. From the top a mushroom’s round shape could be an O. In my comments I said this wasn’t a week 1 meta and I guess the solving numbers proved me right.
This meta made me smile . . . and a little bit hungry. I had no problem figuring out which letters Matt intended. COTIJA sounded familiar, but I needed a quick google to confirm that it was a cheese. I look forward to a fun graphic in Matt’s Friday writeup!
Anyone else get distracted by DORITO which can be anagrammed to TOROID which is the shape of a DONUT?