Food helps us communicate with others. I have known Daphne Bye of Montague casually for a decade, yet I never really knew very much about her until last week. Asking her about her fabulous layered-hummus dish helped me learn about her career and her life.

Daphne is soft spoken. She doesn’t like the stereotype of Canadians as quintessentially nice people, but she and her husband Mark Fraser embody that stereotype nevertheless. I have never seen either of them express anger or hostility.

I knew that Daphne was a pianist and a piano teacher. I only learned when we spoke last week that she is also a practitioner of somatic therapy. I asked her what that involved.

“Like so many things, trying to put it into words can complicate it,” she protested. Nevertheless, she tried to enlighten me. Somatic therapy involves looking at and, in Daphne’s phraseology, “listening to” a client’s body for physical manifestations of inner tensions or trauma.

“We listen to the body with its many ways of knowing and of holding information as the reference point for understanding and working with our thoughts and our experiences … I just love it because a person’s body knows where we need to go in any session. We’re just listening to that and working with it and learning from it,” she told me.

In addition to practicing somatic therapy, she gives piano lessons. “I love teaching. I always have,” she said. “I teach from age 5 to 80 right now.” She added that the two sides of her career “inform each other.” Both connect physical activity with a person’s inner life.

She performs less than she did earlier in her life and career. Nevertheless, she and her husband Mark will perform a piano-cello concert this Sunday, Sept. 29, at 2 p.m. at the Mary Lyon Church in Buckland Center. Donations at the door will help the church’s furnace fund.

The concert will include short solos and duets. “It’s going to be our favorite music from Bach’s time to the present,” noted Daphne.

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Daphne has a long-standing connection with that church. At one point in her career, she was on call as a substitute musician for a number of churches in the Pioneer Valley, including Mary Lyon.

Today, she is too busy to do a lot of church work. “But when Buckland wants me, I go ... because they’re special to me,” she explained.

Another special part of Daphne’s life is her extensive garden at home in Montague. She grew up in a family for whom gardening was important.

“Part of our chores in the summertime was gardening: picking, freezing, canning with my mom. Those are good memories,” she smiled.

Today, she prides herself on being able to eat fresh food from her garden seven months of the year.

She is a big fan of the green vegetables she grows. “My favorites are all kinds of salad materials. I love green beans, zucchini, kale and chard. Because we’ve had such a beautiful September the garden is still in full swing,” she enthused.

Daphne follows a relatively specialized diet. She doesn’t eat gluten, dairy, or sugar, and she tends to avoid grains in general. “My body’s happier without grains,” she told me. “It used to be hard,” she said, “but more and more people are following similar diets.”

I certainly didn’t feel at all deprived eating her layered hummus, which was lovely to look at and lovely to eat. She served it with corn tortilla chips, but if one is grain free like Daphne, one can use vegetable sticks to pick up the dip.

Daphne chops the vegetables for the hummus very finely. She even quarters her cherry tomatoes, which can’t be easy to do. The result is that each bite of hummus brings with it several different vegetable flavors, embodying the produce of late summer and early fall.

She said that she has seen similar dishes that add a layer of sour cream and/or guacamole to the hummus. Although I’m a fan of both, I told her that it seemed to me that those might muddy the flavors of the dish.

“I agree,” Daphne affirmed.

All the ingredients here are more or less to taste, and one could easily double or even triple the recipe. Daphne tends to end up with 1 to 2 cups of chopped vegetables of varying colors. She suggests adding, or substituting, other vegetables according to preference.

Ingredients:

8 to 16 ounces of hummus

finely diced red bell pepper

finely diced black olives

finely diced red onion

finely diced scallions

finely diced cucumbers

quartered cherry tomatoes

chopped herbs: basil, parsley, or cilantro (I think she used basil when she served this to me.)

a generous drizzle of olive oil

Instructions:

Spread the hummus on a small platter. Top it with the vegetables and the chopped herbs.

Drizzle olive oil over all.

Serve with tortilla chips, gluten-free crackers, or sliced vegetables.

Serves 4 to 8 as an appetizer.

Tinky Weisblat is an award-winning cookbook author and singer known as the Diva of Deliciousness. Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.