Stephanie Valentine is chef at Oak Savanna Vineyard in California. She graduated from the Culinary Institute of America and worked for many years at Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago. Before joining Oak Savanna in 2004, Stephanie was chef at Roxanne’s, the groundbreaking raw food restaurant near San Francisco. She contributed the recipes in the cookbook Fandango.

Kathy FitzHenry from The Occasional Gourmet (San Francisco, CA) defines Vanilla as: "Vanilla is the fruit of a green orchid plant that grows in the tropics. It is native to Central America and is grown in many tropical areas including: Madagascar, Reunion, Hawaii, Papua New Guinea, Costa Rica, Tahiti, Tonga, Vanuatu and other areas throughout the world.

The Vanilla flavor comes from the level of vanillin that is created during the processing of the ripen pods. Pods are picked green and then are dried/heated during the day and covered and sweated at night. This process creates the vanillian and gives the vanilla beans its flavor.

The bean pods should be pliant, slightly tacky and sable brown to brown black in color. Do not buy a bean pod that appears shriveled or cracked. Most bean pods range between 8 and 12 inches in length and ¼ to ½" in width depending on the type of bean pod "

James Villas was the food and wine editor of Town & Country magazine for twenty-seven years. His work has also appeared in Esquire, Food & Wine, Gourmet, Bon Appétit, Saveur, the New York Times, and the Atlantic Monthly, among other publications. Two of his cookbooks have been nominated for a James Beard Award, he has won two James Beard Awards for journalism, and he received Bon Appétit's Food Writer of the Year Award in 2004. Villas is the author of more than a dozen cookbooks and books on food, including My Mother's Southern Kitchen, Crazy for Casseroles, Between Bites, Stalking the Green Fairy, The Glory of Southern Cooking, and The Bacon Cookbook .

Maryana Vollstedt is the author of more than a dozen cookbooks, including Meatloaf - Recipes for Everyone's Favorite, Big Book of Easy Suppers, Big Book of Potluck, Big Book of Soups & Stews, and the best-selling Big Book of Casseroles, which has sold 150,000 copies. She lives in Eugene, Oregon.