Would you be wrinkle free?

Do you hope for smooth, clear, wrinkle-free skin all your life, or at least past middle age? Forget costly face creams. Save the money you might have spent on Botox. Although a lot of time in the sun will weather our skins, what we eat and drink matter, too. Some foods foster skin wrinkles. Some slow it down. The two lists below come via Dr. Jonathan V. Wright’s newsletter, Nutrition and Healing. He got them from a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

1. Wrinkle accelerators: sugar, sugar sweetened fruits, soft drinks, pastries, cakes and cookies, potatoes, processed meats, and milk. Go easy on those.

2. Foods that help you keep wrinkles away: eggs, beans, yogurt, nuts, olives, spinach, eggplant, asparagus, celery, cherries, melons, prunes, apples, pears, tea, and pure water. Work some of these into a meal each day, and your skin will thank you, but so will your taste buds, and the rest of your body.

Take eggplants for instance. They’re key ingredients in Greek cuisine. The Greeks say no man will marry a woman who doesn’t know at least a dozen ways to cook melitzanas (eggplants), and that this vegetable helps a nursing mother produce plenty of high-quality milk.

A winter favorite of our Greek eggplant dishes is Papoutsakia, stuffed "little shoes."

MELITZANAS PAPOUTSAKIAS
4 servings
1 large or 2 smaller eggplants
¼ cup butter or olive oil
1 pound leanest ground beef
1 onion, chopped
3 Tablespoons minced fresh parsley or 1 Tablespoon dried parsley
1 teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon black pepper
Sauce (see below)
Sesame seeds, optional
½ cup grated kefalotyri cheese

Cut off and toss stem and green leaves. Cut eggplant in half lengthwise. Soak in a basin or sink of salted water for 20 minutes to get rid of the bitter juice. The water will turn brown.

Drain, rinse and pat dry. Scoop some of the pulp from the center of each eggplant half, leaving a shell ½-inch wide. Rub the shells with olive oil, inside and out. Place in a baking pan and pop into the oven for a few minutes pre-cooking, but not so long that your eggplant shells collapse. Place eggplant, hollow side up, in a baking pan.

Filling: Heat the ¼ cup of oil or butter and sauté the beef. Breaking it up into meat grains as it cooks. Push meat to one side of the pan and sauté onions until soft, being careful not to let it over-brown. Add the scooped out eggplant pulp and parsley, salt and pepper. Cook uncovered until all the liquid is absorbed. Stuff each eggplant half.

BECHAMEL SAUCE:

Melt 2 Tablespoons butter in a skillet. Stir in 3 tablespoons flour. Remove from heat. Cool. Whisk in 1 cup warmed milk, plus salt and pepper to taste. In a small bowl, beat an egg well. While beating, gradually add some of the milk. Add this mixture to the rest of the milk. Stir and cook until the sauce thickens. Stir in grated cheese if using. Pour sauce over the stuffed eggplants. Sprinkle with sesame seeds if desired.

EASY BROILED EGGPLANT: Peel and slice a large eggplant. Soak slices in salted water for 20 minutes. Line a baking sheet with foil, spray it with olive oil spray, Drain the eggplant slices. Pat them dry with paper toweling. Lay them of the oiled baking sheet/sheets. Spray with olive oil. Sprinkle with dried of chopped fresh oregano, salt and pepper. Broil 4 to 5 minutes, until fork-tender and lightly goldened. This tastes so good that two people can easily eat one entire eggplant cooked this way.