It was during a recent class on holiday cooking that the subject of vanilla extract came up. One of the items I made was a trendy salted caramel sauce flavored with homemade vanilla. Well, there was ...

Vanilla suffers typecasting as ordinary. In software, it’s vanilla versus custom. In finance, it’s vanilla versus exotic. But vanilla hardly counts as plain. Consider her bio: Vanilla comes from ...

Claire is Lifehacker's Senior Food Editor. She has a B.S. in chemistry, a decade of food journalism experience, and a deep love for mayonnaise and MSG. Plunking a scraped and spent vanilla bean into ...