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.

I couldn't find any pomegranates or seeds, so I just left them off and garnished with mint. This was the first time I've had to do that. I think the biggest down side was that without the pomegranate seeds to signal what the stuff is, people think it's bean dip. A rather reddish bean dip! So I had to tell them. Now, back to my question -- Linda, how much cream or butter would I need per cup of dip? How do you mix it in? I guess I could use the mixer, but it would have to be very gently, because I don't want to break up the nuts and corn too much.

Actually, I am pretty sure that my shrub is chaenomeles, Japanese quince, not "true quince." The flowers are orangey and come before the leaves in the spring, and the fruits are small and more apple shaped than pear shaped, and I think only come every other year. They definitely could not be eaten raw. But they do work for preserves. They have a lot of pectin, so you don't need to add anything. I put the peels and cores into cheesecloth and boiled them along with the fruit. And after I threw that away and pureed the fruit, I did indeed stand there and stir it almost constantly over very low heat for about 80 minutes (but you can turn it off and take a break). It wasn't so bad; I just read while I did it, and it was so much fun to see it turn that beautiful color and thicken up. It worked like magic. The pot was even easy to clean. We ate some with some manchego cheese -- YUM! The problem I have is how to cut the stuff easily and neatly. It's SO sticky. I would like to cut it into little squares I can give away. It's drying on the counter for a few days, so that might help. But if it doesn't, what would you do to cut it neatly?

The trout I have had has been bland, and I would not want to add sesame oil to it, and so I guess that is out. I also do not want more soy sauce - this is a pomegranate sauce, not a teriyaki sauce, and it has the flavor balance I want as it is. Kevin agreed that chicken thighs would be good, but I forgot to mention shrimp to him. I'm going to see if I can find the shrimp in the freezer, and if I do, I might just use that, as it would take less effort. I'm just not sure about pomegranate with shrimp, whereas I think pomegranate and chicken thighs would be fine.