Big day

Friday was a big day for my daughter me. My 4-year old had an introduction to her new school, class and teacher. Her first taste of big school before her official start in September!

While she happily waved bye and headed into the classroom without even looking behind, I have to say that those strings tugged hard at my heart. No, I didn’t have to pull out the tissues…because I’m strong! And I had just eaten a big bar of chocolate an hour before and so was riding the happy sugar rush.

But it wasn’t so long ago that she looked like this:

4 years later, she looks like this:

So I headed home and pulled out the biggest bottle of vodka (not very big) that I could find…to make some vanilla extract.

After coming across a few blog posts on how easy it is to make your own vanilla extract, I decided to make my own. It sounded easy enough. All I needed were vanilla pods and alcohol – I used vodka as that was all I had in the house. That and wine. I didn’t think that red wine would be very suitable…though now that I think about it, red wine and vanilla – yum!

Anyway, I scraped the vanilla pods, put the pods and seeds in an empty bottle (which I‘sterilised’ first by putting It in the dishwasher), then filled the bottle up. A bit of shaking and that was it.

Ingredients:

Roughly 5 vanilla pods (I probably didn’t need that many but was a bit overenthusiastic)
About 250-300ml ml vodka

This is what it looked like on Friday.

By today (2 days later), the colour of the liquid had changed significantly.

All it needs now is a little patience and at least 6 weeks for it to magically transform into liquid gold!