Samantha's current culinary school preoccupation is ice cream in all its forms: gelato, sorbet, and granita, as well as the good old-fashioned type. This leads me to examine the external nature of this process, namely the machinery of ice cream making. One informative source is makeicecream.com. They have a very large assortment of machines from the simplest and least expensive home gadgets, to the big restaurant grade behemoths, described with jargon like, "countertop, 3 head, single phase 208-240 volt, air cooled, gravity fill, model #CS2-237". Sounds good to me. Crank it up!

But this stuff is expensive, so I too a look at eBay to see what they might have. As always, the answer is lots. They had good deals on all sizes of machines, including a very neat White Mountain maker powered by John Deere. It's a bit big for our apartment, but I can definitely see having something like this in Maine.