HOLLY NADLER

508-274-2329

(hollynadler@gmail.com)

Just when you thought you knew how to eat right, the game changes once again.

Your town columnist isn’t about to change her game just yet, but she was lucky enough to attend a dinner party this past Saturday night at the Kennebec avenue home of raw foods domestic goddess Eva Rawposa.

All nutrition gurus should look the way the rest of us aspire to look, and Eva, young, beautiful, with glowing, rosy skin, light brown hair and wide-set blue eyes, certainly fits the poster girl bill for her own raw foods nutrition plan.

In her large eat-in kitchen, and cradling her five-month old daughter (bébé looks just like mom, right down to the blue eyes), Eva presided over a pot-luck buffet of such concoctions as Michael West’s kale and mandarin orange salad and Karen Hill’s fettucine alfredo (no cheese, no gluten; some sort of cashew concoction, and thrillingly good.)

Things weren’t always la vie en rose for young Eva’s health. On her Web site (uncooking101.com), she regales us with her past woes: “I managed to eat and stress myself into all the nonsense I will never deal with again — ulcers, heartburn, acne, depression, lack of focus, and I just generally had no oomph.” She also admits to a mortifying gas problem. She googled nutrition fixes for digestive complaints, found her way to raw foods and, after her first green smoothie (we’ll get to that in a sec), she felt reanimated. “I haven’t needed even an aspirin in four and half years.”

The gateway to raw foods nutrition lies in something called the green shake. At first glance, it looks like a sneaky way to get kids to eat their spinach. Eva cautions against substituting spinach with the miracle-working kale: “Slice up kale in salads.” You can tell she’s fending off fanatics from throwing together a truly gross smoothie the first time their fingers hit the HI button of their blenders.

Eva’s green shake is simple: Blend one to three cups fresh spinach with a half cup of water, one to three frozen bananas, and the amount of ice to meet your own specifications.

Another Vineyard raw food pioneer, Stacy Stover, who also conducts classes, caters, and guides people individually into their own redemptive nutrition plan, developed a variation on the green shake called The Happy Shake. Stacy admits, also on her Web site, that her first priority was to trick her kids into knocking back their green smoothies as if they were milk shakes. Stacy’s special ingredients include one tablespoon of maca, another of raw cacao, and a tablespoon of a healthy fat such as coconut oil, hemp seed soil, or one raw egg (the Cockney English, just as an amusing side note, pronounce raw egg “roig”; it takes a while to figure out what a roig is.)

Please don’t get the impression that at Eva’s party we stood around talking about shoving green stuff into blenders. There was plenty of food chat, granted, but this was a bright and entertaining crowd, among them a lively man named Kurt, visiting with his wife from Wood’s Hole. Kurt has been hired to oversee the re-haul of Alvin, the famous submersible that scoped out the Titanic way down there in the depths of the North Atlantic.

Well, you can’t have a maritime expert like Kurt in the room without pumping him for good stories. We covered the Titanic, of course, and its big centennial, and the controversy about leaving it alone out of respect for the dead bodies. “We’ve come across a nearly zero amount of skeletons,” he told us. But he had plenty to say about the Andrea Doria that got whacked by a big freighter, The Stockholm, in 1956, and sunk off the coast of Nantucket. “A day later, divers were already going down to the wreck,” Kurt told us. Over the years, divers have perished, so their bodies are added to the Andrea Doria casualties.

I’m telling you, that raw foods crowd is super stimulating!

To paraphrase from Jaws, I’m gonna need a bigger blender.

This is fun — Featherstone is holding its Third Annual Garden Tea and Fashion Show on Saturday, May 12, from 2 to 4 p.m. This elegant ceremony takes place under a grand tent, and both the food and fashion are glorious. The cost is $40 a person. Yes, the price has gone up, but it’s worth it. I’m going with the always chic Olive Tomlinson, who sets aside a table of gal pals. Hint: Wear a fun hat!