This pickled eggplant recipe is wonderful, especially if you like Indian food. It's from Small-Batch Preserving by Ellie Topp and Margaret Howard (I'm learning from you all to be good about citing sources ). Also, I make eggplant parmesan in foil pans and freeze, and I froze some salted and baked eggplant slices. They probably became mushy, but I used them in pasta and it was fine. Madras Pickled Eggplant 2 lb eggplant (2 large) 3 tbsp white vinegar 2 large cloves garlic, minced 2 tbsp chili powder 2 tsp each: ground ginger and turmeric 1/4 cup canola oil 1 tbsp each: cumin seeds and fenugreek seeds 1 1/4 cups white vinegar 1 cup granulated sugar 2-4 finely chopped and seeded small hot red chile or jalapeno peppers 1/4 cup finely chopped gingerroot 2 tbsp pickling salt 1. Cube unpeeled eggplant into bite-sized pieces and reserve. 2. Combine 3 tbsp vinegar, garlic, chili powder, ginger, and turmeric in a small bowl to form a paste and reserve. 3. Heat oil over medium heat in a large nonstick skillet. Add cumin and fenugreek seeds and saute for 1 minute. Add eggplant and saute for about 10 minutes or until eggplant is just tender. Add reserved paste and 1 1/4 cups vinegar, sugar, chile peppers, gingerroot, and salt. Stir over medium heat for about 5 minutes or until boiling. 4. Remove hot jars from canner and ladle pickles into jars to within 1/2 inch of rim. Process 15 minutes for half-pint jars and 20 minutes for pint jars. Makes 3 pint jars or 6 half-pint jars.

I wish I had a recipe for the mousakka, but I really just have a list of ingredients and my taste buds. :) Start with however much eggplant you have, and slice it thick (1/2 inch or more). Cook the eggplant (I like to grill it, for maximum flavor, but baking or even frying would work, if you can handle it in quantity) While the eggplant finishes up, I put about a quarter as much onion in a big pot with an equal amount of garlic (I like garlic) and cook them till they are translucent. I soak a smoked chili pepper (poblano in this case) in a cup of hot water for a few minutes, julienne it, and add it with the water along with allspice, a few cinnamon sticks, salt to taste and a good pour of pomegranate molasses. Chop the cooked eggplant into rough cubes, toss that in with a can of chickpeas and tomatoes - if whole, you'll need some more water, if canned, add the juice. This procedure works equally well for a small pot for dinner, or in my case, a full stock pot for freezing. It even works without the pomegranate, but it'll be a completely different dish. I once used preserved lemons (lemons cut into quarters and packed in salt and their own juice for two weeks, rinse and discard pulp and pith) and it was excellent. Now, those peaches... I won't just give a recipe there, either, because the memory is too rich to spoil that way. Instead, you get a story. :) Gram's peaches always started with the ones on the ground under the two massive trees in the front yard, right by the American chestnut that was supposed to be extinct. Any ones not fallen on their own weren't ready, and the ones on the tree made the yard pretty, she'd say. We'd collect them by the hundreds right at the peak, us kids eating ourselves sick in the process. We hauled them inside and cut out any bad parts or bugs (these castoff went straight to the chicken coop, and it seemed like there were five times as many eggs the next week because of those happy chickens) An adult would dip the peaches into a big pot of boiling water and then drop them onto newspaper on the table, where us kids would play "hot potato" with it until we slipped the skins off and split it down the center. Too often, at this point, we'd eat ourselves sick again. Once the dipping was done, and the peaches halved and pitted, most of the pot water was poured off (along with any twigs, leaves, bugs, etc) and gram would mix brown sugar from a big sack, a lemon squeezed and tossed in, and the holiest thing in her kitchen - a vanilla bean, stored in bourbon and "straight from from madagascar" - we'd always play risk later that night, to complete our history lesson. Once the brew tasted right, the jars were brought up from the basement and cleaned with a bottle brush (we kids always seemed to be absent for this part, but not far away) and each big jar got filled to the brim with peach halves, half of a vanilla bean, and ladled with syrup near the top. They were capped off with new rubber gaskets and the glass top (this was a long time ago, before anyone trusted those "flimsy" metal topped jars) and clipped shut. There were a few zinc-capped screw ons, but I guess those were more expensive. Other than that lemon, there was no citric acid added - we preferred them to get brown and musky - it was a big part of the appeal of those peaches. After a water bath (confirmed with visual inspections to ensure the air had been pushed out), they were left to set up in the dark, cool basement. This particular bumper crop batch (I'm remembering back to 1975 or so, and it still thrills me), the peaches were exceptionally sweet, the vanilla astounding, the peaches just the right kind of brown, over sixty jars went into storage and we were enjoying them into the 80's, not only after the harvest, but even after the tree stopped producing. I still can't eat corn flakes without thinking about them. Soon after we put those up, the tree stop producing, as I said, and grampa passed away, and gram seemed to stop canning altogether - we started eating less of our own food and more and more from the store that opened nearby. My gram and the peaches have both been gone for ages now, but I'll remember that day forever - and now, thanks to gardenweb, maybe you all will, too.

Good idea safety-wise or quality-wise? For safety, the issue when making substitutions isn't really one of texture but of pH of the various foods and the density of the foods. If I recall correctly they both fall in about the same pH range of 5.5-6.0 but I can't access my food pH chart right now to be sure as it is off-line. Since it is a BBB recipe it should be safe even with the substitutions but I do think it would be best to avoid such substitutions in the future. For quality concerns then IMO eggplant tends to be softer, less dense, have more water content, than zucchini. So I wouldn't choose to add it. I'd just make up what I had enough of the zucchini to make. If the eggplant slices go mushy and discolor you can always pitch them after the jar is opened. Dave

I like this recipe for Makdous Eggplant, which the author claims is "dillicious", even though it does not contain dill. This one is good, but it did not include the garlic, which I think is an essential ingredient. Look for Syrian recipes, as pickled eggplant is very popular in Syria. I buy it at a Lebanese market. Lars