Food Coloring from Scratch

The meta answer is GREEN (Hint: Find a 5-letter adjective.)

First, a quick note: This puzzle had way more movie and TV-related clues than usual. Not a misdirect or a red herring; it just kind of happened. With that out of the way!

Five of the longer Across answers were either foods or ingredients for various dishes (PIE DOUGH, HAM GRAVY, GARLIC BREAD, SOYBEANS, AND CHESTNUT). So the answer's gonna be food-related, right?

Not quite! The last word of each of those answers also all have something in common: they're slang synonyms for "money" (dough, gravy, bread, beans, and nut). Note that the puzzle's title includes another slang term for money, "scratch."

In addition, five Down answers intersect with those slang words that are found in phrases along with the word "money" (money BAGS, money ORDER, money MEN, EDDIE Money, and NEW money). And where those words intersect with the "food-slang-for-money" words are the letters G, R, E, E, and N. Thus, you get GREEN--which is not only another slang term for money, but also a 5-letter adjective that satisfies the puzzle's hint.

Tricky! But found the path with some collaboration

I got there via the inferred route. I saw the synonyms for money, along with the title and thought, "What color is money" - GREEN. There were a few sidesteps, PIEDOUGH could be PIED which is multicolored (like the Piper!), GRAVY could drop a letter to be GRAY and drop a letter from BREAD and you could get RED. CHESTNUT is a color but that would be a different mechanism and Cory is better at this than to do that. I am not sure if WAD was an Easter Egg or simply a necessity of filling, but it helped me nail down my answer in my mind.

Of course the presence of PAGEANTS made me go, "hmmmm" but I am not sure that is common knowledge outside long-term WSJ puzzlers. The elegance of the intersecting words, I am sorry to say, escaped me. I know I THOUGHT Eddie Money, but I was still solving and not meta-ing so it probably slipped past. I figured there probably was a way to pick the word out of the theme answers since the word was 5 letters and there were five answers, but once I got the "they are all money" then GREEN was too much of a shiny object to look further and see it absolutely WAS green.

Another delightful puzzle Cory