Friday, September 21, 2012

Vanilla




Thanks to the inspiration of my oldest, I am beginning to think more deeply about making things from scratch.  She brought me a cute little blue bottle full of vanilla for my birthday, and I was thrilled.  A blue bottle alone would have been a great gift for me, but vanilla to boot?  Yumola.





But I haven't begun to use the extract yet for fear that it would be gone with a blink.  I comforted myself by starting my own vanilla batch.  I took an old beer bottle from an ale I found at Trader Joe's, I scraped off all the labels, and voila!  I have my vanilla bottle.





~ my bottle's brief foray into the afternoon light...it is now a prisoner of the dark ~



It is hard to even refer to this as a recipe, but here you go:


Three vanilla beans, cut open carefully so as not to spill one little vanilla bean. 
Insert into a bottle.  
Cover the beans with vodka.  
Close the bottle.  
Shove into the dark corner of the cookbook cupboard (or any dark corner will do.)  
Wait impatiently for vanilla to happen (approximately 3 months.)  
Shake the bottle every now and then.  
Enjoy!

1 comment:

Dawn said...

We've been wanting to make vanilla too. A friend gave us some for Christmas last year - delish! Another friend makes homemade kahlua, which sounds divine.