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A couple items:

• The nocino that I made last July is … well, it’s interesting. It’s bitter, sweet, and indefinably herbal all at once, and it’s a dark, dark, impenetrable brown that absorbs almost all the light around it. Photons, enter not these depths! Basically, it looks like the herbal medicine that Grandma gave me when I was little, although it tastes much better. I would like to make a couple more batches next year when walnuts turn green again and see how they turn out.
• I have some left over white wine from a picnic at the beach, and so I looked up methods of turning it into white wine vinegar. Basically, there are three options:
  1. Leave an open container of wine in a warm place for a couple weeks to a couple months, until the mother forms.
  2. Use a mother–a starter culture–to guarantee that the bacteria that form in your wine are the right kind of bacteria for wine vinegar (acetobacter), and not other, unfriendly beasties. Mothers can be purchased online or at a wine- and beer- making supply shop.
  3. Use unpasteurized cider vinegar instead of a mother.

  I’m going with option #1, because I don’t feel like buying a mother or unpasteurized cider vinegar. The point of this exercise is to use up a leftover product and turn it into something usable instead of throwing it away, and by proxy, wasting money, after all. Additionally, I’m impatient and want to start right now, instead of waiting until I can get mother or unpasteurized cider vinegar. I wonder if it’ll turn out okay; if the wrong sort of bacteria will colonize it; and if dumping in a couple spoonfuls of white wine vinegar would help the process or harm it. Since the white wine vinegar that I currently have is pasteurized (I think), I don’t think it would add any helpful bacteria to the wine. I guess I’ll find out in a couple of weeks (or months)!

• Homemade vanilla extract: 12 vanilla beans. 1L vodka. 2 months. Voila! Vanilla extract! At $2.50/bean and $7.65/1L vodka, making it is much cheaper than buying vanilla extract. I now have slightly less than a liter of vanilla extract, and I’m wondering how long it’ll last. In the past, I have finished more conventionally sized bottles of vanilla extract, and that took a long time and multiple baking frenzies, so it’s quite possible that this bottle will last me for a couple decades.

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