New York Times, Wednesday, February 15, 2017

JESSE: Patrick Blindauer and I initially created this puzzle thinking that it would be released around Thanksgiving. As a nod to my family, vegetarians who celebrate ThanksLiving (yes, a vegan Thanksgiving), I thought we could create a puzzle for vegan dinner options. How did that morph into a food snowman? I don't remember.

I've never made a puzzle before, but I love solving them. Working with Patrick, who is a puzzlemaster, was thrilling; it was simultaneously an exercise in boundless, abstract creativity (a food snowman?) and rigid boundaries (we need exactly two 13-letter and two 10-letter foods that are also parts of the body!). It's a discipline that requires multiple parts of the mind: 1/2 Jackson Pollock, 1/2 Alan Turing.

It was also a good opportunity to express my love of African geography (SENEGAL), my family's heritage (POLE) and mention my playwright friend Will (ENO). And it was primarily exciting to use clues that have never appeared before (e.g. Christian with some intelligent designs? for DIOR; What revolting people do for RIOT).

PATRICK: I had a blast working on this with Jesse; big thanks to Will for putting us in touch.

We brainstormed at least a dozen ideas before settling on this, a wacky concept that we originally pitched for a Monday. I was in the middle of my Kickstarter campaign for "Piece of Cake Crosswords," and Jesse was eagerly anticipating the birth of his child. I had recently become a father myself so we chatted about that, as well as our mutual love of theatre. He was eager to learn about all aspects of construction and was an excellent collaborator. It was fascinating to watch his agile mind at work.

Congrats on your debut, Jesse, and happy birthday to the New York Times crossword!

Such a cool idea to have celebs co-construct crosswords! Huge fan of Jesse's roles in "The Social Network" and "Now You See Me." And Patrick is a great partner for a debut collaboration — one of the top puzzlemakers out there.

This is one avant-garde snowman. I've seen HEAD OF LETTUCE and EARS OF CORN in food-like-body-parts crosswords before, maybe even BUTTERFINGERS too, but none of them related to snowmen. Points for … originality? Not sure I ever would have thought of sticking LETTUCE on this horror movie fiend. I can't decide if sticking CHERRY PITS under a snowman's arms is hilarious, or incredibly creepy.

No long bonus entries, but some nice mid-length fill in NFL TEAM, CUTOFFS (perhaps the snowman is a nevernude?) and DARWIN. And some rare letters worked in with care — in JAZZ / ZITI / ZAHN — spices things up.

Such a smooth grid, something Patrick excels at. It was so smooth that I would have liked some more bonus long fill in exchange for a little more crossword glue. Taking out the black square between AGOG and ELITE is one way to do that. Shifting the block above TACO to the right is another option. These changes would make filling harder of course, but as long as the final tally of gluey bits was still reasonable, I would have liked to see that trade-off.

I'd also like to have seen the body parts in more anatomical order, starting with HEAD, to EARS, to PITS, to FINGERS. That would be much tougher to do, since HEAD OF LETTUCE's length makes it unsuitable for row three, forcing all the themers to be shoved tighter together toward the center — and less spacing is almost always a constructor's bane. But I think it would still have been doable.

Some great clues spiced up the solve:

• MACS are decidedly un-PC types — IBM-PC, that is.
• Neat that STENO anagrams to NOTES!
• The (hated, vile) Cowboys are an NFL TEAM, but the Indians are not. Neat use of "cowboys and Indians."
• Absolutely love the DIOR and RIOT clues Jesse mentioned above.

Nice kick-off to what hopefully will be a long series of these celeb collabs!

We count this as Mr. Blindauer's 63rd puzzle because we include his eight Variety puzzles. (Click his photo to see thumbnails of all his work.) Seven of his Varieties are Diagramless, but the eighth, called Out of Order, is clever and original and highly recommended. Try it before you jump to the answers.

Across Lite (Be sure to read the Notepad!) and Solution.