Des tomates, encore des tomates !

Abondance de biens ne nuit pas. That's a French proverb. It means: "Plenty is no plague." In other words, there's no harm in having so much of a good thing. (Biens are "goods" and nuit is the third person singular of the verb nuire in French — "to harm" — from which derives the word "nuisance" in French and in English.)

I'm talking about the 2013 tomato crop, of course. Too bad we don't have very many neighbors any more, or we could give some away. Yesterday, I again spent a few hours trimming and cooking tomatoes.

As I was saying a couple of days ago, the 2013 grape harvest is supposed to be the smallest in more than 20 years in France. The same is not true of tomatoes — at least not around Saint-Aignan. We've got red ones and we've got yellow ones. We probably have a ton of green ones too.

When life hands you tomatoes, it's best to make sauce. There was a feature on the French news the other day about how this is the sauce-making season in Italy where, it seems, everybody grows tomatoes and makes sauce in the autumn. Abbondanza non nuoce...