1. Fill a mason jar or bottle with vodka. After you use the seeds of a vanilla bean in a recipe, rinse off the vanilla bean and put it in the vodka. You’ll need at least 3 vanilla beans in there for at least 3 weeks to get a good extract going, but it’s fine to use more beans, too. Your extract is ready when it is a lovely brown color and it smells like vanilla.

2. Either pour the extract it into a new bottle and start over or keep topping off the working bottle with vodka and keep shoving more vanilla beans into the bottle. As long as you don’t let it get too empty, you can keep using the extract indefinitely even as you continue to top it off.

See more at http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Vanilla-Extract-395869