Vanilla

Of all comfort foods, those scented with vanilla are the most infallibly calming and pleasing to me. Cookies warm from the oven, cinnamon buns, puddings, pastries - all these flood my brain with endorphins, even just to smell them. Oh, the pleasure of slicing open a vanilla pod and, with the point of a small knife, scraping out the fragrant pulp and minuscule seeds. Put the empty pod in the sugar bowl for vanilla-scented sugar.

I read years ago that vanilla comes from orchids. What a beautiful notion. So I looked it up and found that they are grown commercially in many parts of the tropics and subtropics. Can you imagine a grove?, a field?, a forest of vanilla orchids? Wikipedia says they are mostly sweet smelling, but do they smell of vanilla? What a concept! They are very pretty flowers, too. Think of that when next you take a luscious bite of a vanilla-scented treat.