Vacation has been good to me.  I’ve had lots of time to bake cookies, cakes, and most recently, these delicious homemade soft pretzels.

Some of you may know that I adore soft pretzels.  I started my affair when living in Germany, where every bakery would sell them fresh and delicious.  It’s also a welcome treat at a Red Sox game.  I know, I know…  at $4.50 it’s such a rip-off, but it’s the experience I look forward to more than the food.  And for a non-Fenway-Frank-eating vegetarian, it’s something to stave off the between-inning hunger, you know?  And with that yummy yellow mustard? I can’t help myself.

Anyway, I discovered today that soft pretzels are incredibly easy and fun to make, and within about 2 hours (most of that in the rising or baking time), you can be munching on your own.  I used Alton Brown’s Homemade Soft Pretzel recipe.

Here’s a close-up!

The recipe makes 8 pretzels in all, but I made 4 pretzels and 4 rolls (I do love a good pretzel roll!)  The salt is course sea salt, lovingly procured by my husband yesterday as my obsession was forming.  I love being able to put on my own amount of salt – I’m generally a big salt fan, but not so much of the overwhelming amounts of salt on pretzels sometimes.

I will be making these again (and again, and again)!

OK, so I was so enticed by all the information I found on making your own vanilla, that I couldn’t wait and decided to make my own ASAP.  It’s remarkably simple and I think it will yield a great lot of vanilla that’s much cheaper and better than what you can buy in the store.  Here’s a picture tutorial on how to make your own!

You will need:

• 1 airtight bottle
• 3 vanilla beans
• 1 cup of vodka, preferably 100 proof
• About 6 weeks of waiting  :-/

1) Buy some vanilla beans.

I’d suggest finding them online.  I checked the grocery, and two itsy bitsy vanilla beans would cost $8.99.  I got thirty Madagascan beans from the Boston Vanilla Bean Company for $37.50, since this is what they recommend for extract.  (If you bought that many at the supermarket, it’d be $134.85!  Seems like a great deal to me…)

2) Check out your new beans.

I’d never actually seen/touched/used a vanilla bean before this project.  When they arrived, I was surprised that they were really long, kind of thin, and most surprising of all, they were moist.  They were packed in an airtight plastic bag and then tube, so they didn’t dry out on their way to me.  When I opened them?  HEAVEN.  They smelled so, so good!

3) Split the top of the beans down the middle.

Conventional wisdom says that the more exposed the substance you’re trying to make extract from, the quicker and stronger the process will be.  So, take 3 beans from your stash, and cut the top with a knife down the middle.  [Side note:  yes, that's a coconut macaroon in the background.  I made them just before the vanilla.  You might notice them disappearing during the making of this tutorial   What?!?  I was hungry!]

4)  Open up the vanilla beans

If this is your first vanilla bean experience, you might be surprised at what you find.  I know I was.  First, your fingers grow to an enormous size!  Just kidding.  Actually, the part I didn’t expect is that the inside is quite moist and grainy, full of the black vanilla specks you might think of when you think of good french vanilla ice cream.  At least, that’s what I think of!  It’s fairly messy and gets all over your fingers if you’re not careful.

5)  Cut the opened vanilla beans into ~1″ pieces

6) Break out the vodka!

When I arrived at the liquor store, I was confronted with row after row of vodka, all priced and branded differently.  Luckily, I went to the yuppie liquor store next to the Whole Foods, where the staff is friendly, knowledgeable and probably very well-versed in which wines to pair with your Pennsylvania bailey hazen blue artisanal cheese or your Muscovy duck confit.  Thankfully, the guy that works there also knows about extracts (doing this at home might just qualify as a yuppie task, come to think of it…).  He was able to help me out of my deer-in-the-headlights stare and guide me to the appropriate alcohol to do the job.  Here’s what he said:

• The higher the proof, the more efficient and strong the extract.  That is, it extracts faster and tastes better.
• The best thing to use would be 150 proof grain alcohol (pure ethanol).
• The next best thing to use would be 100 proof vodka.

Ethanol sounded scary to me, so I went with the vodka.  Plus, if I had any left over after my vanilla experience, I could actually drink it, whereas grain alcohol apparently tastes like the stuff you apply to your wounds.

I settled on the Smirnoff triple distilled 100 proof vodka.  Number 57!

7)  Prepare your oh-so-adorable bottle

Wash out your bottle.  It can be any type of bottle or jar, as long as it has a cap (like a screw cap) or stopper like this one.  I found this one at the Container Store.  It holds almost exactly 1 cup of liquid, so is perfect and adorable for this task.

8 ) Fill the bottle with 1 cup of vodka and your cut vanilla beans

When this is done, feel free to eat a macaroon!

9)  Shake your new vanilla extract 1x per week and wait!

This is the hardest part!  The waiting, not the shaking.  That said, it’s fun to shake the bottle when it’s all sealed up. You’ll see the brown specks begin to mingle with the vodka and the liquid will turn a very light amber.  The mixture will darken over time.  Right now it’s just barely amber, but after a while, it should darken to the luscious color of dark brown vanilla, so long as you regularly give it a good shake!  I’ll try to post updates to show the progress.

So there you have it.  Your own vanilla extract in 8 easy steps.  I’d love to hear how yours turns out if you decide to make it!

I think my most frequently purchased baking supply, besides flour and sugar, is vanilla.  It is insanely expensive, and I always feel resentful picking up a decent bottle that costs more than 10 dollars, knowing that it won’t last for very long.  As a side note, it makes me even more enraged to know that the most expensive bottle is the best deal, even though it climbs up into the higher double digits.  Despite knowing this intellectually, I can rarely get myself to invest in that much vanilla at one time.  For some reason, I have a mental block against buying things at the grocery store that cost more than 10 dollars and only make exceptions once in a while.

It has never really occurred to me to make my own.

Jessie at The Hungry Mouse has a great picture tutorial showing how to make vanilla extract with a few vanilla beans and some vodka.

The Boston Vanilla Bean company, based here in MA, has their recipe posted online with a link to their extract-grade beans available for purchase.  So far, they seem to be a quite reasonably priced place to buy vanilla beans online.  An even better deal than the go-to Penzey’s, for example.

Clotilde at Chocolate and Zucchini has her own take on this as well.

The bottom line: Place 2 or 3 vanilla beans into about a cup of vodka (or rum). It seems people all do it a bit differently.  Chop the beans, split the beans, or just put them in whole – there are all of these variations out there and it seems you can’t go wrong.  Either way, place it all in an airtight container and let it sit for 8 weeks or so, shaking the jar once a week.  Voila!  Vanilla extract!

When you’re about 1/3rd through the bottle, refill to the top with vodka.  Add more vanilla beans from time to time to keep the formula going.

I will do the vodka version, since it seems to be the purer version.  I can’t wait to try it!

Have you ever made your own?  Any experiences to impart to a newbie?

I’ve been experimenting with more dehydrator goodies.  Most recently, I made the cookies pictured above from some apricots, dates, walnuts coconut, and sunflower seeds.  I didn’t measure, but just put in handfuls of everything into a food processor, processed until it was pasty, made cookie-shaped balls of the paste, sprinkled with dried coconut, and then threw it on a dehydrator tray to cook for a while at 135°  for a couple of hours.

It wasn’t quite right after just 2 hours. It tasted way too much like the sunflower seeds, so I dried them for about 4 more hours…  All better!  I think next time I’d omit the sunflower seeds altogether, since they didn’t really mesh with the rest of the flavors. 

This recipe for peanut butter bites is next on my list to try.

I’m 32 now. I think it’ll be a good year, if this first week is any indication.

So far in this new year, I’ve treated myself to some new fabric, which I’ll be receiving shortly and will photograph when it comes.  Happy birthday to me!  I’ve also discovered and now adore Greek yogurt. There are tons of varieties being stocked in my local grocery (when did that happen?) but Fage is my favorite brand. It appears to be pronounced Fa-yeh, for those of you that read out loud in your head, like I do.  The Trader Joe’s nonfat is really delish, too.  I’m going to try them all until I find the one I like best.  A lofty goal for the next year, no?

Also in this new birthday year I made some tomato sauce from scratch.  Mastering a great tomato sauce has long been among my summer plans, but I’ve only made it twice.  This time I made it from this recipe, which actually took a lot longer to cook than he says, despite his ridicule of hours-long sauce cooking.  I’ve jarred it for now and plan on making stuffed shells, even though they’ve been poo-pooed by my Italian-American coworker as being Italian-American fare that he tries to avoid at all costs.

(What he doesn’t know is that I don’t mind living down on the lower end of the cultural culinary spectrum.  Stuffed shells are brilliant and cheesy and great, don’t you think?)

Speaking of which, do you have a good sauce or stuffed shells recipe?  Grandma’s best?  Perhaps something reverse-engineered from your favorite restaurant?  A good cookbook?

We had a lovely birthday celebration with my family over the weekend.  We’re lucky enough to have a group of birthdays all within a few days of each other – mine, my dad’s, and Ryan’s.  And so we get together.  This year, we ate blueberry pie with hearts.  Yum!

We are taking part in a CSA this year for the first time ever. It’s from a local farm just down the street from us (or, as per my new bike computer, approximately 2.6 miles from our house).  Tomorrow we get our third installment of the 10-week program.  Above is week two’s bounty.

It’s exactly what you might expect such a thing to be. Farmer Tom is a warm, friendly man who wears an Australian rancher hat atop his head; he has shaggy-haired staff members that use as few fertilizers and chemicals as possible on his haphazardly planted and overgrown strawberry patches.  Cheery girls staff the farm stand (with the occasional grumpy teen that can barely muster a “hello”).  Old rickety barns and run down vehicles pepper the path to the Pick-Your-Own areas.

We get a nice mixture of fresh picked items that are packed for us in an eco-friendly reusable bag, and each week we are given containers to pick our own fruits and veggies that are in season.  For the last two weeks the PYO items include these:

So far, I’ve turned these into 7 jars of strawberry preserves, which are mutually adored by Ryan and me.  It’s from my favorite canning resource, the Ball Blue Book of Preserving (check out more canning items in the sidebar).  This recipe is from page 40 and is insanely good!  In fact, just about all the recipes I’ve used from this book are pretty darn great.

Since the preserves, I’ve also made two strawberry rhubarb pies.  Tonight’s pie turned into a pie FAIL experience.  See below:

Can you see the drippy, sticky mess that overflowed into the oven and smoked like crazy, driving Ryan to remove the smoke detector from its ceiling perch and curse (gently) my decision to put a soupy over-full pie into the oven?  If you can, you only saw half of it!  What the picture doesn’t show is how this pie dribbled its way all the way to make a big puddle on the floor to make an even stickier mess.  Eesh.

The good news is that the pie, once removed from the oven and cooled, was amazingly delicious (even though I had to do some juice-ladling to save it from a soggy future).

The even better news is that we’re getting one more week of PYO strawberries.  I’m not sure I’ll want to make a third strawberry rhubarb pie, so I’m eager to hear your favorite strawberry recipes.  What’re you making these days, or, what would you do with multiple quarts of strawberries?

Woah, people.  Have I told you yet of my love of falafel?  Of the amazing, delicious chickpea-based middle eastern delicacies of joy?  Falafel, served up in a crispy toasted pita with hummus and delicious tahini sauce, is one of the most simple yet wonderful of meals, in my humble opinion.  It is a vegetarian staple.  It helped sustain me when I lived in Germany (as a vegan, no less.  In that meat-loving country, this is not easy). I feel great love for this food, and yet, I never thought they could come up with something equally tasty in CHIP FORM.  My heart melts.

I will tell you that I immediately put these into my shopping cart the other day at the store. I will also tell you that, despite their USDA organic, Made in the USA, low sodium product attributes, I was apprehensive about them (I mean, can they really mess with the original falafel goodness?)  But I’m pleased to say, they were worth every penny of their $4.99 (!) pricetag, and I will buy them at the froo froo grocery each time I go, just to make sure that they don’t discontinue them. They actually taste like falafel, with the same strange falafel aftertaste that you other like-minded connoisseurs out there will understand.

Here’s what they look like out of the bag.  Round, crunchy, yum.

And do you like my new cactus plant?  And Ikea pot?

In other non-falafel-related news, I’ve been doing lots of crafty things these days and will have lots to show you in the coming days.  More soon!

P.S., OK, just in case you thought I was kidding about my love for falafel, I would like to relay to you the fact that one of my favorite pictures from my time in Germany was of the nice Turkish guy that ran my favorite falafel stand that I frequented enough to become a regular. He knew my order inside and out.  The picture was of him standing behind the counter holding a falafel sandwich triumphantly in one hand. I took the photo to include in a little photo-calendar number I made for a friend, and I so wish I still had a copy (this was pre-digital, thus ancient history!).  Maybe I’ll find it some day and scan it in. When I went back to visit during a trip back, his store wasn’t there anymore.  Hopefully he’s still bringing falafel joy to other obsessed people like me.  We can only hope.

I woke up this morning to a gloomy, rainy day.  In contrast to yesterday’s beautiful 65 + sunny spring day of re-potting plants, cleaning out garden beds, and a lovely evening with good friends, today’s weather has left me unmotivated and uninspired. Huh.  Must change that, I suppose. I’ve considered going back to bed, but I think I may end up baking something, instead.  Sugar makes everything better, right?

The picture above was taken during last year’s visit to New Orleans.  I think I took it either hanging out of a car window, or through the back windshield.  Either way, the ancient-looking building was exactly what you might picture as the brains behind such a timeless brand name.

Now, what to bake?  Hopefully something I already have all the ingredients for – I have no desire to leave the house!

This weekend, I made some more homemade bagels.  They turned out great!  This time, I used this recipe, since it was the first that came up on Google.  I’m not so picky, it turns out.  And this one got great reviews.   I wanted an egg & cheese on a bagel (my favorite occasional morning indulgence), but didn’t want to make the trek all the way to Dunkin Donuts (a whole 3 blocks away!).  So I took matters into my own hands.

I used all-purpose flour instead of bread flour, because I didn’t have any on hand, and they didn’t come out with a crispy outside.  That’s actually fine by me, since I’m a fan of the chewy soft delicious bagel anyway.

I love how they looked after cooking:

These bagels are flavorful, have good texture, and are delicious toasted (but then, that might have something to do with my obsession for toasted sesame seed…)  Since they pass the egg and cheese test with flying colors, I’ll probably be making these again!

Cooking Tip: To get a perfectly bagel-sized cooked egg for your own egg & cheese, take a large ramekin, spray with cooking spray, and crack an egg inside.  Microwave for however long it takes to cook – about 1.5 minutes in my microwave, but mine is small and underpowered.  Lay some cheese on top and cook a little longer ’til you have gooey perfection.  Insert between toasted bagel, and there you have it – your own delish breakfast sandwich!

Happy weekend, everyone!