Heavily edit with beauty filters, as a photo, in modern lingo / TUE 10-14-25 / Savory South Asian rice cake / Apples, pears and quinces, botanically / Skewered dish served with peanut sauce

Constructor: Stella Zawistowski

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: Terms of endearment — familiar two-word phrases are reimagined as responses to questions from one's significant other: first word = the response, second word = a term of endearment

Theme answers:

• SUMMER, LOVE (17A: "In what season are the Olympics during leap years, sweetie?" "___")
• ALFALFA, HONEY (26A: "Which 'Little Rascals' character has a cowlick, sugar?" ("___")
• MEDIA, DARLING (42A: "What are oils and watercolors examples of, dear?" "___")
• BEANIE, BABY (56A: "What do you call a close-fitting hat, doll? "___")

Word of the Day: IDLI (45D: Savory South Asian rice cake) —

 

Idli or idly (/ˈɪdliː/; plural: idlis) is a type of savoury rice cake, originating from South India, popular as a breakfast food in India and in Sri Lanka. The cakes are made by steaming a batter consisting of fermented de-husked black lentils and rice. The fermentation process breaks down the starches so that they are more readily metabolised by the body.

Idli has several variations, including rava idli, which is made from semolina. (wikipedia)

• • •

["CLOCHE, BABY!"]

Very short write-up today because ugh I start teaching not one but two "mini" courses today, which is not a thing I even knew existed before this summer, and I those are in addition to the course I'm already teaching, and I had a significant tech / communication failure this weekend, which means ... whatever, it's all a mess. It'll be better by the end of the week, but right now it's organizational chaos. So I gotta deal with the puzzle fast so I can go make coffee and worry about it all until school starts at 8am. Annnnnyway, this is a really original concept, I think, even if I have no (real) idea what ALFALFA HONEY is. I mean, I can infer what it is ... honey from bees who eat alfalfa nectar. Just like MANUKA HONEY (mmmm, if you've been to NZ, maybe you know) is from bees who eat manuka nectar. We eat a lot of honey in this house. Or some. None of it is ALFALFA HONEY. But so you have to use a marginal honey type in order to make the symmetry work, so what? It's fine. What's not as fine are some of the questions in the clues. It's totally reasonable to forget the name of Alfalfa from Little Rascals, but "What are oils and watercolors examples of?"?!??? First of all, they're paints. The only sane response to that question is "PAINTS, DARLING." Second of all, if the answer is really MEDIA (or paints), does your partner really not know that term? That's ... interesting. The Olympics question is worded in a completely implausible way. "Are the Summer Olympics in leap years or non-leap years?" feels like the more natural way to ask that question. But I think I was distracted most by the phrasing of the clue on "BEANIE, BABY." "What do you call a close-fitting hat, doll?" Me: "CLOCHE! It's a CLOCHE." I mean, if you're gonna not know a hat name, it's far (far) more likely that you would not know CLOCHE. Everyone knows the term "beanie." Who is asking babe about "beanie?" That's just sad.

The two words that are most likely to throw people today are YASSIFY (23A: Heavily edit with beauty filters, as a photo, in modern lingo) and IDLI. The latter has appeared in the puzzle twice before, but never this early in the week, and the former is (unsurprisingly) a debut. I know the term YASSIFY (though I'm not sure I could've told you *precisely* what it meant), but it didn't matter much if I knew it because I had its first and last letters already in place before I ever looked at the clue, so it just sort of wrote itself in. Nothing else it could've been. From Merriam Webster dot com:

Yassify is likely a combination of yass, an interjection (used to [express] great excitement or enthusiasm for a thing) that arose in New York City’s Ballroom scene, a Black and Latino LGBTQ+ subculture, and the suffix ify, “make or form into.”

As for IDLI ... remembering it was probably my biggest triumph of the day. I feel like I'm constantly trying to remember short food names that have come into (my) crossword consciousness only recently, and they keep falling out of my brain. I mean, ask me how to spell BIRYANI? Is that right? Hey, it is! Wow, I'm on a roll (which is not how you eat BIRYANI) (is it? no, pretty sure it's not). I think the puzzle did give me the initial "I" as a head start, but I got IDLI from there and I feel pretty good about it. I had less luck in the west, where I whiffed on far more ordinary (to me) things. The big error du jour was EDUCATION for ERUDITION (32D: Quality of a scholar). This led me to imagine (briefly) that an updo exposed your ENDS (?) (like the ends ... of your hair?). I also had SEEDS and not RINDS at 46A: Watermelon leftovers, a much more understandable error, and that helped gunk things up for a bit. LORD before LADY Bridgerton (40D: Noble title on TV's "Bridgerton"). I also needed help getting from [Moral justification] to RIGHTNESS, which just seems like another word for "correctness." Had not thought of the word as having a moral component. "Righteous," sure. But RIGHTNESS was slightly unexpected.

OK, that's it. See you next time. Oh, and happy birthday to my (manuka) honey :) We're always asking each other (cryptic) crossword clues, so I hope this birthday puzzle resonates for her, at least a little (my questions aren't this dumb, though, are they, honey? ... are they!?)

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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