Wednesday's puzzle solved: January 3, 2018

My time: 8:36, great for a Wednesday.

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Bruce Haight feeds our hunger for more funny themes by serving up four food-related puns: IT'S NACHO PROBLEM, LET'S TACO BOUT IT, and YA WANNA PIZZA ME?. Frankly, I CANNOLI IMAGINE where he comes up with this stuff.

"All that JAZZ" is clued as if it is a common phrase, but it's actually a song from the musical Chicago and a semi-autobiographical musical by Bob Fosse, named after the song.  I feel like it should have some identifying attribution.

"Northern Florida county seat" is OCALA, a city in Marion county, the 45th most populous in Florida.  Not a huge cultural touchstone.

I have never heard of RONA Jaffe, a novelist best known for Mazes and Monsters, a fear-mongering book about the perils and evils of fantasy role-playing games.  (Her first name was a clue on December 9, but about gossip columnist Rona Barrett.)

I did not know an ELM has "serrated leaves that taper to a point."  I don't know much about trees.

I've seena  few episodes of "VEEP," but I don't think I could have come up with the name of Julia-Louis Dreyfus' character Selina Meyer.

An ALTOcumulus cloud is a high, heaped cloud that sometimes signifies a cold front meeting a warm front.

Seiji OZAWA, "longtime Boston Symphony maestro," appeared as an answer yesterday.  I'm surprised how often this happens.

William INGE, "playwright of the Midwest," won a Pulitzer prize for his play "Picnic," about an engaged woman who falls for someone else.

Clever clues: "Follower of a bullet" is ITEM.  "John, in Britain" is LOO (not *IAN!).

I went through this puzzle with ZEST, because it matches my pre-existing SCHEMA.