Last night we had a lovely simple dinner of falafel topped with tahini yogurt, alongside a salad of tiny roasted eggplant, broccoli, red onion, arugula, and quinoa. I like to make falafel using black-eyed peas rather than chickpeas as the base for the paste. I think the flavor is mellower, but also the texture is much easier to handle. Given that I usually shallow-fry the patties (instead of deep-frying or baking), I prefer a more malleable mixture that drops easily into a pan. 

And now I have a bunch of leftover, ready-made paste to fry up for tonight's poetry salon, so that saves me a step.

I'll be editing all day, but first I plan to go out for a walk and maybe, possibly, spy another batch of maitakes, a word that spell-check keeps trying to change to "mistakes," the complete opposite of what those mushrooms are. I've been reading Jiles's News of the World, which I did not expect to like but which has turned out to be a gorgeous, spare Texas western. And I've slowly been examining my notebook of draft-blurts--not making progress on first drafts but hoping that will come.

I should mow grass, but I don't have much else to do in the garden, other than slowly begin to shut it down. The kale and chard are gorgeous, and soon they'll become our primary daily vegetables. Leaves are beginning to turn, and the yard is settling into autumn shabbiness. I should check the quinces on the shrub I share with my neighbor; we are looking forward to making an apple-quince dessert with our tiny crop. I should walk down to the farmers' market this afternoon and see what's available there to pad my harvest stores . . . maybe some potatoes, maybe some sweet peppers.

I'm not writing very well just now--or at least I'm writing uncomfortably, awkwardly. This doesn't frighten me; I recognize my boom-bust cycles. Still, it makes me itchy and unsettled.