What should I do with too-dry vanilla beans? A few weeks ago, I bought a few vanilla beans to make mint ice cream. I only needed one, so I put the other bean back into the glass container it came in. Today, I was having a hard time using the vanilla bean while making a trifle.

When I took it out of the container, it was very dry and not pliable as I would have expected. I was still able to scrape the seeds, but the bean was broken into several pieces because it was so brittle.

Is there anything I can do to too-dry vanilla beans to make them easier to use?
You can still use them in most of the recipes you would otherwise.  In custards, like ice cream, just soak the whole bean in the hot liquid (that will eventually end up in the final product) for a moment and it will re-hydrate enough to use easily.  Many, many recipes are such and you'll just need to soak them a moment in the recipe's liquid.

Worst case - bust out the booze and roll your own extract.