Exact same thing for me. Got Green but then struggled with Blue before I got the right combination. Took a wild guess to finish Yellow with Jack. Probably never would have gotten Purple.
The key to avoiding being stung by red herrings is to not immediately submit the first category you see. Leave it highlighted and look for the next categories. Like everyone, I saw the red herring first today, but I very quicky saw blue and yellow as well and needed words from the red herring category to complete them.
For the record: Monterey Jack cheese. Sometimes combined with Colby cheese (another cheese not common outside the US) to form Colby Jack, and Pepperjack is another common (in the US) variant. I’ve had all three.
Cheese straws are a thing. That’s what caught my daughter out.
My secret power came in handy today. As soon as I saw CRAN I thought of CRANE and then looked for other words that fit the pattern. I never saw the berry red herring.
Today got GYBP. Again didn’t actually get purple. I took two wrong guesses.
I was going with people named Steve but I only knew two but thought I would guess. Then I didn’t know Goliath was a show.
Yeah, I also did’nt know Goliath, so while I spotted the pattern there, I tried once, got it wrong, was going to have to guess and possibly fail. Then I saw the trick on purple!
Connections
Puzzle #746
I got Green, then got Yellow (I would argue Protein isn’t a thing, it’s more of contents of a thing, but whatever, Americans are weird) but completely failed Purple and Blue.
The machine answer was weird because it was three generic terms that have the literal word “machine” in the name and one proper name. That ended up being my final one even though I saw the first three right away.
I had the same thought.
For some unknown reason (unknown to me, anyway) that became a thing fairly recently.
(And I have yet to see Tofu offered as a protein choice…)
“PROTEIN” as a synonym / replacement term for “meat” has been a thing for at least 20 years. And, yes, I have seen tofu and other non-animal food products offered in that category.
Green, if it were purple instead of green, would be titled “____-machine.” The “kinds of machines” label is I guess technically accurate, but is broader than those four words.
Florence & the would probably be too much of a giveaway.
Today got green, blue, purple, yellow. Wasted three guesses trying to find the last purple. I keep getting one away and I was absolutely sure of three of them since that was the first category I saw. Also avoided the trap since I couldn’t find a fourth.
It may also be more of a US English thing, and GuanoLad lives down under, IIRC. But, yes, it’s a common term here for quite awhile now.
Connections
Puzzle #747
They were all easy today. But purple was the easiest for some reason.
It seems like some kind of health trend thing that became mainstream. Whatever the case, it’s not how I think of food: physical Items, not chemical breakdown of constituent parts.
It’s very characteristic of a certain kind of restaurant to offer something like:
“Choose your base, your choice of protein, toppings, and sauce”
OTTOMH: salad bars, poke places, Buddha bowl places like freshii or CAVA.
Exactly. Here it’s also Mediterranean places (which here means mostly Middle Eastern and Greek food, so stuffed pita or plates type of things), some corporate Mexican places like Chipotle or Qdoba; I’ve seen a Middle Eastern place serving Thai/pan-Asian bowls with the format, choose your protein, your noodle, your sauce, etc. (Here’s their menu with the wording.) As an aside, it’s an odd place. It’s called HelloThai, but as you can see, that menu is not particularly Thai. (Oh, it looks like they have a separate mostly Thai menu, too. It seems like a confused place.)
After a few hard ones, today I just motored through.