New York Times, Wednesday, January 30, 2019

The idea for this puzzle came to me this past summer after seeing banana split on the menu while taking my wife on her first ever trip to, our country's greatest culinary national treasure, Dairy Queen. How anyone could have survived 30 years on this earth without trying a Blizzard is beyond me. Luckily those dark ages are now behind us.

My original submission had BANANA SPLIT, ORANGE PEELS, GRAPE LEAVES, and LEMON DROP all as long answers; however, this ran into some consistency issues in terms of plurality and tense, so the editing team had the solution of separating BANANA/SPLITS and LEMON/DROPS in order to address this problem but still maintain symmetry. Never would have occurred to me to try that, so many thanks for the advice and patience as this went through a few rounds of revisions.

I likely would have made this the POW! if I had understood it.

Sadly, I convinced myself that the theme was "items with a fruit in their name that ironically don't actually contain said fruit." LEMON DROPS don't contain any actual lemon, etc. I chalked it up to being an iffy theme and moved on.

Jeff, Jeff, Jeff.

I know! What a moron! How is it possible to be so oblivious?

Thankfully I asked Jim about it, and he explained the idea. Ah! The puzzle is FRUITLESS because the BANANA SPLIT, the ORANGE PEELS (out), the LEMON DROPS, the GRAPE LEAVES! This becomes a MUCH more interesting idea, one I wouldn't have thought possible. Incredible to discover so many (fruit) + (synonym for leave) phrases.

Perhaps a headline approach would have better overcome my obliviosity:

[SMALL PURPLE WINE INGREDIENT FLIES THE COOP!]

[TART OVAL GOES MISSING!]

The grid felt a little rough around the edges — not surprising given the theme density. Seven (!) slots means a ton of constraints to work around. Sure, some of them like LEMON are short, but that doesn't make the execution that much easier.

AREPAS, wow that's a toughie. LA PLATA too. With some ADM MES OCT ROI RPI TIAS, it didn't feel like a polished product. I might have tried adding a black square at the T or P of TSTRAP — or at both locations — which would have made filling the north and south regions much easier.

A shame that this one went over my head — if I wasn't blogging, I'd have dismissed the cleverosity completely. The longer I think about it, the more I like it.