Middle Eastern food: some not quite in season for Americans (7)
I believe the answer is:
falafel
'season for americans' is the definition.
Although both the answer and definition are singular nouns, I don't understand how they can define each other.
'middle eastern food some not quite in' is the wordplay.
'middle eastern food' becomes 'fall' (I can't explain this - if you can you should give a lot more credence to this answer).
'some' becomes 'a few' (I've seen this in another clue).
'not quite' means to remove the last letter (most but not all of the word).
'in' is an insertion indicator.
'afew' with its last letter taken off is 'afe'.
'fall' enclosing 'afe' is 'FALAFEL'.
Can you help me to learn more?
(Other definitions for falafel that I've seen before include "food item" , "Cake of ground chickpeas" , "Middle Eastern deep-fried ball of chick-peas etc" , "vegetarian snack" , "Deep-fried ball of ground chickpea" .)