I am a girl who loves a great deal. One year when I was in college, my mom told me that their budget for us for Christmas was $200 dollars each (my parents have always been too generous). My sister-in-law asked for a coat. I still remember it. It was a beautiful 3/4 length gray wool coat. I asked for a trip to TJ Maxx. I got 3 sweaters, two skirts, two shirts, some pants, a belt, 5 pairs of tights and some underwear. I don’t think my sister-in-law was very happy on Christmas morning after opening her one box and watching me open a dozen of them. I still have two of the sweaters and that was 20 years ago. My walnut Danish modern dining room set with two leaves and six chairs only cost me $300; a great graduate school find at the Kiwanis sale in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Three years ago, Erik and I bought a car on e-bay. That’s right. A car. From e-bay. My mother is a great bargainer and I learned from her example. When I go with Erik to garage sales, he gives me all the cash and makes me talk to the people. I, of course, put my cash in different increments in different places, so that if I want to pay $10 dollars, I reach into my left pocket, pull out a neatly folded Hamilton and say, “Will you take ten bucks? That’s all I’ve got.” You get the picture.

Normally, I limit my use of vanilla beans to recipes that really beg for the visual specks that come from using them, or recipes that only use vanilla as a flavoring, like for vanilla ice cream. When I do use vanilla beans, I always save the pods after having scraped them clean. I even fish them out of the custard or pudding, rinse them off, dry them and save them. For what? For vanilla sugar. What they call in French sucre vanill?. In France you can buy pre-made vanilla sugar in little paper packets or little bottles. I’ve sometimes seen it in the U.S., but it’s not cheap here. So I put my used up, cast off vanilla bean pods in a jar filled with sugar and use it to give a boost to recipes that call for both sugar and vanilla extract. I’ll also use it when making hot chocolate or when serving a fancy tea.

About 5 months ago, I read about a great source for cheap vanilla beans at one of my favorite food blogs. You can buy vanilla beans for 1 euro a piece, that’s about $1.30 in American dollars, from a website run out of Mayotte, an overseas territory of France. Vanilla is a major agricultural product of this island, part of the Comoro archipelago off the southeastern African coast near Madagascar. I got so excited about the deal on vanilla that I ordered some right away and soon I was the proud owner of 2 packages of vanilla beans with 10 beans in each package. An embarrassment of riches for a person like me, because like I said, I love a bargain. I also love to cook with the finest quality ingredients and these two pursuits don’t always go together.

I’m sure you’re asking yourself, o.k., where’s the catch? Because if I’m writing about this, there must be a catch, right? Well I’m not sure, but I recently read a post from another favorite food blogger about unfair labor practices from some of these cheap vanilla sources. On this blog is a link to the site of Patricia Rain, the woman they call the Vanilla Queen. At www.vanilla.com, the beans are twice as much money, but are touted as “pure, natural, environmentally safe and cruelty-free!” Is this a dilemma? Am I supposed to worry about where my vanilla comes from? Where does the vanilla come from in the expensive little brown bottles of vanilla extract at the grocery store? Is there such a thing as cruelty to vanilla beans? Erik suggested to me that I’m having this reaction because of my culturally Catholic upbringing. The Catholic Guilt issue is there, he’s right. But this is something else. Global warming, the promotion of democracy and paying attention to food sources are all starting to feel like intricate pieces in the puzzle of post-modern American life that are increasingly difficult to navigate (nice mixed metaphor, eh? Let’s sail across the puzzle of life together my friend). I’m left with bourgeois angst over how to spend my blameworthy blood stained American greenbacks. And I eat meat. At least my car gets almost 50 miles to the gallon (such a good deal). But Volkswagens sold in the U.S. are assembled using cheap labor in Mexico. As you can see, I’m driving myself crazy. I can imagine my sociology colleague’s repartee, “Yes, but you have the leisure to be going insane, while those people harvesting vanilla on the other hand…”

While I’ve been anxiety ridden over the vanilla question, others have been blithely blogging about their vanilla successes and gushing vanilla love. Deb at Smitten Kitchen did an entry on vanilla with a recipe for vanilla bean pound cake with gorgeous photos. It seems that like me she’s afflicted with what my mother always called the champagne taste with a beer pocket book syndrome. Matt over at MattBites uses vanilla in a savory treatment, with vanilla brined pork chops (sorry he doesn’t have permalinks, you’ll have to go to his site and search for the recipe, but poking around there will be worth your while, I assure you). Sara Moulton did a whole show on vanilla with several great looking recipes I’m going to try soon. She even mentioned Patricia Rain.

Finally, at one of my favorite new blogs, cookthink, I found what might be a solution to my conundrum. It appears that at Hartley’s Herbs you can buy a bottle with some vanilla beans in it. You open the bottle, take out the beans, slice them lengthwise, put them back in the bottle and fill it with alcohol (rum, whiskey, cognac, vodka, etc.), let it steep for a couple of months and you have Perpetual Vanilla Extract. Every time you use some, you top off the bottle. The claim is that you can keep your bottle of vanilla going forever this way, just add more alcohol as you go along and occasionally throw in some new vanilla beans.

You can order your Perpetual Vanilla from Hartley’s or just do like I’ve done. Slice vanilla beans lengthwise, put them in a bottle, fill the bottle with alcohol, cork it and let it sit until the contents turns into vanilla extract. I slit the beans without cutting through the tips so that they would hold their shape and I used rum. You don’t need a recipe for this, right? Now I’ll have vanilla extract whenever I want it at a bargain price. With the money I’ve saved, I can buy politically correct vanilla beans. Or shoes. I made three bottles, so I can give two of them away to friends. I may be cheap, but I’m not stingy.