Constructor: Michael Lieberman
Relative difficulty: Medium
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THEME: Don't eat that! — theme answers are food items clued as if they have an ingredient they would never actually have—that "ingredient" is instead found literally (in the circled squares) in each answer:
Theme answers:
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Gotta be quick with this write-up because I stupidly left my laptop charger plugged into the wall of my work office and ... well, I don't trust laptop batteries. My experience has been they tend to be almost fully charged and then all of a sudden they're near zero battery power and somehow there's no in-between. We're pretty good right now, so let's go. This theme has a couple of layers to it—the "what the hell kind of food item is that!?" layer and the "take it literally" layer. Maybe it's just one layer, but the fact that all the wordplay stays in the food realm is what gives the theme its icky charm. I wish there had been a way to lean into the disgustingness if not outright inedibility of some of these concoctions. I don't really know what a "lemon turnover" is, but I'm pretty sure if I found one in my WESTERN OMELETTE, the result would be GAGS (6A: Reacts to something gross). Ditto chopped liver in my balsamic or split peas in my peach melba. This leaves [Sandwich with wild rice], which actually sounds fine. The way it's worded, the rice sounds like a side dish, and even if the rice did somehow make its way into or onto your sandwich, you probably wouldn't gag, so the wacky food factor is not nearly so evident with that answer. I like how there's a different type of wordplay going on in each theme answer, and that the wordplay comes from absolutely ordinary culinary terms ("chopped liver""wild rice" etc.). Thematically, this is solid. No complaints.
Relative difficulty: Medium
Theme answers:
- BALSAMIC VINEGAR (17A: Salad dressing with chopped liver) (the word "LIVER" appears "chopped" up inside "BALSAMIC VINEGAR")
- MONTE CRISTO (28A: Sandwich with wild rice) (the word "RICE" appears "wild" (i.e. mixed up) in the middle of "MONTE CRISTO")
- PEACH MELBAS (48A: Desserts with split peas) (the word "PEAS" is "split" in two inside "PEACH MELBAS")
- WESTERN OMELETTE (60A: Egg dish with a lemon turnover) (the word "LEMON" appears "turned over" (i.e. reversed) inside "WESTERN OMELETTE)
Alana de la Garza (born June 18, 1976) is an American actress. She is known for her roles as Connie Rubirosa on the NBC television series Law & Order in the last four seasons of its initial run, Law & Order: LA until the show's conclusion in 2011, and in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. She also portrayed Marisol Delko-Caine on CSI: Miami. In 2014 and 2015, she starred as Detective Jo Martinez in the ABC series Forever. From 2016 to 2017, she starred in Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders as Special Agent Clara Seger. In 2019, she began starring as SAC Isobel Castille on FBI, a role she also plays on the spin-off series FBI: Most Wanted. (wikipedia)
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Is BALSAMIC VINEGAR a "salad dressing" all on its own. I tend to think of it as a salad dressing ingredient—mixed with oil, at the very least. But maybe some people just dump it right on there, I don't know. The hardest themer for me to get was WESTERN OMELETTE, specifically the WESTERN part (which appears in the "western" part of the grid!). "Egg dish" = OMELETTE, which I had, but there's nothing in the clue that suggests "western," so I had to hack away at crosses to see what kind of omelette I was dealing with. Not hard, but somewhat slower going than other parts of the grid.
Wrap-up:
As for the fill, a little too much crosswordese (EPODE, ugh), a few too many names (ALANA BALOO ADELE and on and on), and *way* too many TV networks. If you've already foisted TRU and MTV on us, why in the World would you also clue BRAVO as a TV network!? (51A: "Top Chef" network). The puzzle is already running way too hot on proper nouns; take the opportunity to staunch the flow when you get it! The longer answers today are solid enough. I really like DIALECT and RUBS IT IN, and I'm definitely going to need some SALTINES to cleanse my palate between the courses of today's menu. I struggled most with ALANA, who, like yesterday's ILENE, I'll apparently never remember. She's on a bunch of network crime shows I've never watched. I didn't even know there was a TV show called "FBI" (let alone a spin-off! ... my god, it's a whole damn franchise!?). I haven't watched network TV in what feels like a decade, at least. It's a big entertainment world that I know nothing about. I watch TV shows, and I am aware of many TV shows that I don't watch, but almost none of them are network shows. Just ... alien territory to me. Weird how, in my lifetime, ABC / CBS / NBC (and later FOX) went from virtually the only game in town to marginality and irrelevance (as far as quality is concerned—there's still an audience, obviously, I just don't know who they are). Of the eight comedies nominated for Emmys this year, only one ("Abbott Elementary") is a network show. And in the drama category: zilch.
Wrap-up:
- 49D: Source of a scandalous comment (HOT MIC) — first answer: HOT TIP!
- 26D: Capital that was once part of Denmark (OSLO) — first answer: MARK! (OK, hear me out. I think my brain read "Denmark" as "Germany" and then took "Capital" to mean "money," and then the "once" part suggested bygone money ... and there we are: the bygone German currency, the MARK. Ta da! :(
- 19D: Off one's game (NOT ON)— this was an answer that I thought was NOT OK. That is, I did like the clunkily literal cluing ("off" = "not on"), and I also literally thought the answer was NOT OK. I wrote in NOT OK. Thank god that ALAKA was not a plausible human name (my apologies to the ALAKAs of the world!)