Real Soup

On the Renewal of Dancing

Life is odd. A mixture. A puzzle. A quirk in the great void.

Looking out at the winter sky where the stunning moon and speckling stars hang in the cold with no returning gaze, one's heart can fill with unnerving speculations.

Are we paying close enough attention, we might ask ourselves? Are we absorbing the silence, taking it in, saving it for our hours of need? Have we spent enough time contemplating the edge of the universe and our relationship to it, or the concept that the resolution of suffering is wisdom?

Possibly car trouble holds a higher priority. Perhaps our feet hurt and we are cranky. Or maybe we are busy pursuing the final fly of the year as it teeters through the living room on a fool's errand.

Deep concentration on reality is difficult to those of us fully engaged in it, especially if one begins by attempting to define it in its many new, commercialized forms. We tend to need bridge material between the profound and the mundane.

We do get locked up. Enclosed in effective circuits like house wiring. Time speeds by and we are still working. Things darken and become arid, prosaic, howlingly humdrum. We forget to allow the extraordinary to happen, those sorts of time when the sparks fly out from us, when the answers come before the question, when the opening of the heart momentarily transcends all planetary dysfunctions, when we see in the faces of loved ones, friends, new people our own joy reflected.

This brings me to dancing. Dancing brings us home.

Greek dancing, in my Irish opinion, is especially effective in bringing the masses to communion in great long noisy serpentines of perspiring giggly people who are struggling to sway, kick, pivot and whirl and remain generally upright whilst following the cues from some far away tinkling sunny music behind the scene, and the eloquent feet of the line leader.

Breathless, on the brink of dehydration, near collapse, this small crowd experiences a kind of full, outgoing integrity that tends to unify theories; it reminds us, simply, of our link with everything. This is good.

In honor of all such events, I offer the rustic Grecian appetizer spread, Skordalia.

An hors d'oeuvre that takes less than five minutes to prepare from ingredients in the humblest pantry, packs a wonderfully bold wallop of garlic, and has the added virtue of using any and all of the stale bread in the household, this bread and garlic dip from Macedonia has not a beauteous face.

It will tend to sit in a wheaty lump as if waiting to attach wallpaper unless you just serve it out briskly and give it a chance to prove itself and win smiles from those suspicious faces.

An ancient recipe, more method than measurement, make Skordalia to your taste.

Assemble all the dry bread - whole wheat in particular - from the bread box and assess its status. If it is quite hard and thick you may need to soak it in a large bowl under a weight for a few minutes in order to achieve the same outcome as running slices under cold water.

Squeeze soaked bread out, breaking it into pieces at the same time, and drop it into the bowl of a food processor or blender. A mortar and pestle is traditional here.

Add to 4-5 dampened and squeezed slices of bread:

3-10 cloves of fresh garlic

1/2 - 1 C. olive oil

1/4 - 13 red wine vinegar

salt to taste

Serve it with cucumber slices, celery, bread, artichokes, beets, bread sticks, or, like a true Greek, with shark fritters.

Or just eat it out of the blender. Like a good wine, it pleases the heart.