We have a hand-crank Donvier we got when we were married in 1995 that is almost constantly in use from about the 4th of July to mid-September. (The brand-name one is overpriced. Get a clone, which can be had for under $20 on sale.) DH wants an electric and I may get him one for his birthday (which is 2 days after Christmas LOL) if end-of-summer sales yield any REALLY good prices on reliable machines. Here's the base recipe we use, from the Ben & Jerry's book... I don't think you could GET any simpler, and it's surprisingly good. We pretty much never use a custard base because our kitchen is not air conditioned, and diddling around making custard in a 90-odd degree kitchen is officially Not Worth It in our book. For a 1 quart ice cream maker, combine 1 can sweetened, condensed milk (many of us remember it as "Eagle milk") with 2 cups light cream, a splash of vanilla extract and a pinch of salt. Do NOT leave out the salt! Stir well, chill at least 2 hours before putting in the ice cream maker. You can substitute full-fat ("cream top") vanilla yogurt for half the cream but it doesn't really save you much calorically, just does interesting things to the flavor and can make you feel a little virtuous LOL! Lower-fat yogurts give a strange chalky texture and unsweetened yogurt makes for very sour product. (Found from unpleasant experience that just chucking a quart of yogurt straight from the container into the ice cream maker, no matter how yummy it is normally, does not make nice frozen yogurt, oh no not at all!) There's a simple plain base, now start playing... A super easy way to get a delicious fruity flavor ice cream is to substitute 1 cup of a good strong jam for 1 cup of the cream. (I don't recommend doing both jam and yogurt and eliminating all the cream. The result came out... the only word I can find for it is "stretchy".) The jam concentrates the fruit's flavor; warm "seedy" jams like raspberry or blackberry until they're liquidy and push them through a strainer if you don't want to be picking seeds out of your teeth for days. If you want fruit pieces, line a cookie sheet with the nonstick foil or baking parchment (or a Silpat if you're blessed with one), spread out a layer of finely chopped fruit with the pieces not touching, or minimally touching, and freeze rock solid. Add the fruit pieces at the very end of churning. Toast any nuts you wish to add for a stronger, "nuttier" flavor; and grating frozen chocolate bars on the largest holes of a grater (use an oven mitt to hold the chocolate so your body heat doesn't melt it) gives a better result IMO than using chocolate chips, even the mini kind. If you want to use something like butterscotch chips, freeze them and break them up in small batches in a food processor on "pulse". Good use for one of those mini-chopper types. Remember that your liquid ice cream/sorbet/yogurt mixture has to be almost sickeningly-sweet in its unfrozen state to taste "normal" as a finished product - the cold numbs your taste buds so all the flavors have to be STRONG. Oh, and filling the churning chamber more than about 2/3 full, 3/4 at the most, can be a recipe for a Big Sticky Mess. So don't do it. Honey-sweetened ice cream does not store well more than 24 hours - it gets crumbly and weird-textured, so if you want to do something with honey, have enough people around to scarf it down within hours of curing. Alcohol will interfere in the solidifying process so if you really load it up even with an overnight cure you may not get more than a "soft serve" texture. We bought a whole slew of nice little (not quite 1/2 cup) lidded plastic containers into which we portion the ice cream while it's still in the "soft serve" state. Pop them in the freezer and in 4 hours it's solidified enough to have the proper ice cream "mouthfeel", although I like 8 hours' curing time. If we don't pre-portion it DH will go WAY overboard! Oh, and the famous Mark Bittman/New York Times "eggless ice cream" was IMNSHO utterly REVOLTING.

I believe that kind of "funny business" is happening here in the US, too. Yes, get foreign workers cheaper. . . . I belong to 2 credit unions - - and have a new, great rate mortgage from the out - of - town one we've belonged to for 15 yrs. (even when we moved 1000 miles away, we kept the contact.)

I figured out what I did wrong in the photos - here's another try: Keep in mind that the backsplash will be white/clear one inch glass tile. This is one door that we will not be using that I experimented on - I added some trim, and like the cream color on the left. The floor will be less yellow when installed - it will be tiled with a light warm gray - it is linoleum. My baking center. Counter to left is not finished, and there will be a white tile backsplash. Quite a few of the upper doors will stay off, with the exception of the upper right corner cabinet, and two others not in these photos. We still need to add trim, tile back splash, and a bunch of other small stuff which really adds up. Just would really like to do something with the lower doors/drawers until we can afford new ones. Thanks!

@ The Logician, Fortunately, the hospital is a small, long term care unit, situated in a more open neighborhood, and on top of one of the highest hills in the area. It's quite a wonderful oasis amidst all the concrete. Also, my position in the organization might allow me to expand the butterfly offerings, if I throw my weight around. LOL Martha