I have family that insists you can freeze milk, but store bought milk has never frozen well for me.
Now the vanilla, I would enjoy reading how you make it, where you buy your ingredients and such too.
We freeze store milk, so we can buy large qtys when the price is down. The secret to it, we figured out after years of trial and error, is to thaw it fast in a sink full of hot water. Let the faucet run over the handle while the sink is filling. As its getting close to thaw, pick the carton up by the handle and shake it back and forth in a rotating motion, like its hanging on a string and twisting in the wind. You should feel the chunk of ice in the middle break up and the whole thing will start to sound like a slushy. Put it back in the sink and let it sit until its totally thawed, shaking it now and again. The faster and more violently you thaw the milk, the better the solids will reincorporate.
Just watch out for damaged milk jugs, they've been getting cheaper and thinner over the years.
http://www.vanillaproductsusa.com/servlet/StoreFront
This where I get my vanilla beans. I've been buying from them for years. You want the grade b, aka extract grade beans:
http://www.vanillaproductsusa.com/servlet/the-241/"vanilla-beans"-"bourbon-vanilla/Detail
Their grade b are better than the grade a from a lot of other sellers. I usually buy 1 lb at a time, and that will make three 1/2 gal. batches.
Once you have the beans, the rest is easy. Buy a 1.75 liter plastic bottle of vodka. Dark Eyes is my favorite, its a good balance between being cheap, but not too skanky. Pour about a pint of vodka into a clean jar and set it aside. Feel free to sample it if that's your thing.
Chop the vanilla beans into one inch chunks. Some sources say to split the beans lengthwise, which is much more messy and time consuming and has no benefit I've been able to detect. You'll have to pry off the white plastic pouring cap from the vodka bottle, but don't destroy it, you'll want to put it back at the end. So put all the bean bits in the vodka, then top it up with the pint you poured off earlier. You'll end up with a cup or so left over. Make a pitcher of Bloody Marys and have a great day!
Date the cap with a sharpie. Shake it every couple of days. I think I let mine sit about six weeks before I use it, but I make it when the old batch is half gone, so sometimes its several months. You can't go too long, because it reaches a maximum saturation at some point. It stores indefinitely.
For a 1/2 gallon (that's the 1.75 L) bottle of vodka, I use 6 oz of vanilla beans. It makes a pretty stout extract, and you could probably go as low as five ounces, but I wouldn't go lower. For a 750 mL bottle of vodka, which is your standard 1/5 gallon size, use 2.5 to 3 oz. of beans. Anything else you can divide off the 1/2 gal. size - 3 oz beans for 1 quart booze, etc. All these are approximate, as long as you're within an ounce of beans per half gallon, the extract will be fine, and you can adjust to your liking as you go along.
One other note - don't try to sub other kinds of booze. Rum does not make good extract. Gin already is extract, of juniper berries and other sundry herbs and spices. Whiskey is right out. Vodka is best and pretty much the only thing that will give you a good result.
One other other note - you don't need to adjust quantities of vanilla in your recipes. The extract you make will be a bit stronger than what you buy in the store, however, baking experts the world over agree that the biggest sin of the modern cookbook library is that they universally and without exception call for too little vanilla.
that's about it!
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