Another busy day

We had our first slices of ambrosia melon last night. They were so good! I was worried because although the melon "slipped" off the vine, it didn't seem ripe and I thought maybe I had just been pulling too hard. But after a day or two on the counter, it got softer and developed a wonderful ripe smell. Whew.

I'm not too happy with the new mixer so far. I tried to make a really wet dough this morning, and it seems like the dough hook only mixed the top 1/4 of the dough. Underneath, the flour wasn't incorporating at all. I don't know if the bowl is too big for the recipe, the calibration of the machine is off so the hook doesn't go down far enough, or what. I had to scrape down the sides to the point that I was more or less mixing the dough by hand, then I switched to the paddle attachment just to get the dough mixed (since the dough was so wet that it was somewhat batter-like), then switched back to the hook to knead, although it still seemed like it was only moving around the top of the mixture, so I don't know how effective the kneading was. Really disappointing. I'll have to try some stiffer doughs before I see if there's really something wrong.

The ketchup yesterday turned out delish, btw! Thank goodness for that! And it cooked down in only 3-4 hours (which helps since it took so long to get rid of the peels and seeds).

For the rest of the day, I made tomato sauce and giardiniera. And that took forever. I got thirteen jars of tomato sauce (fourteen originally, but one broke while I was sterilizing it), and so far 4 large jars of giardiniera. I ran out of pint jars. And then I ran out of time. I was sweating so badly in the kitchen with the hot giardiniera, the boiling water from the canning bath, the oven from baking bread, and the heat outside. Whew! Doing all this stuff is hot sweaty work!