08 October 2013

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...

10 comments:

  1. These shots of sauces are very appetising... just in the raw!!
    Yep, it is the season to be saucy...
    take a look here... [http://www.flickr.com/photos/le-moulin-de-la-forge/]...
    the first three pix are some of ours from this year.
    Not quite a rainbow... Bleu Fruit turned out to be a very, very dark red... but very tasty.
    None left now... the blight got our last toms.

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  2. Je ne savais pas que tu étais poli de la glotte! Io no hablo espagñol.

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  3. Love these tomato shots!

    Okay, I can't make sense of how your French quote at the beginning fits together... is there a typo in there? Should that second de be a ne: Abondance de biens ne nuit pas.

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  4. Typo, Judy! Thanks for catching it.

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  5. Isn't the Internet wonderful, CHM?

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  6. Another idiom for mon cahlier I keep beside my computer! You and Walt have been the major contributors but now and again I do pick up a few new vocab words off other sites!

    Those tomatoes do look tasty. Striking colors.

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  7. Ken

    Do you grow your own coriander?

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  8. We do. Mais elle monte très vite en graines, la coriandre, sous nos climats. Pas facile.

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  9. lovely! i think we are about done with maters around here.
    :-)

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  10. I was going to ask if you mix the colors, then I saw the other photos.

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