East Magazine

Gingerbread is the quintessential Christmas treat, but when mom is a Scandinavian baker and dad is a gifted painter, cookies are elevated to an art form. Nina Dohanos looks back on childhood holidays — and divulges some family secrets for better baking.

The recipe here is for a sturdy, spicy, and very crisp cookie. It holds up well, and will not get soggy or stale. Follow the directions as written, practice your rolling, and make sure you have a good, airtight container. Don’t skip the dot of blue coloring in the glaze, and if you want to hang them, make the hole in the dough with a toothpick before baking. This cookie recipe can also be used to make gingerbread houses.

From Steven Amaral, proprietor and chef at North Fork Chocolate Company, comes this take on spicy hot chocolate.

Eight adults gather around a dining table in Southampton, early evening, early summer. It isn’t a book club, but the group uses one as its guide: 2040: A Handbook for the Regeneration by the Australian author Damon Gameau, based on a documentary of the same name.

Mind Offline has a wide assortment of clothing, crafts, and yarn for knitting, as well as a soothing and welcoming atmosphere in this online-heavy world we live in. Recently, the shop embarked on a journey to produce yarns and hand-knit garments in the most close-looped, eco-friendly system possible: sourcing, milling, and producing fibers no more than 300 miles from the store. The result is Local Wool Co., and it’s fast becoming a vital element of Mind Offline’s offerings.

Before there were free electric-buggy rides offering ice-cold mineral waters on your way to Main Beach — before the instant chill of ducking into a brisk Ralph Lauren boutique to escape the blazing rays, before anyone had ever heard the words “climate change”  — there were ice houses. 

Baby needs a new pair of shoes — now that the weather’s changing and school’s about to begin, here’s a shopping guide, from Montauk to Southampton.

Sushi and sashimi — they're fun to eat, fun to look at, and fun to make yourself. With the right combination of tools, tutorials, practice, and products — mostly accessible on the East End, with maybe a little help from the internet gods — it’s not all that hard to pull off your own night of Japanese cooking.

If there’s a way to be here and not here at the same time — like a ghost you can hear laughing, or a well-dressed omniscient narrator — Mike Lavin has figured it out. A photographer and filmmaker, podcast engineer and videographer, Lavin has been building a name for himself as the talent behind the camera that has captured some of today’s hottest comedy and rap stars.

There is an artifact that is now housed in the Long Island Collection at the East Hampton Library — framed, and hung on the wall behind protective glass — that dates back 323 years. It measures just under four-and-a-half inches long and less than half that high.  It is only a small fragment of cloth, woven of silk, cotton, and metallic gold and silver thread. Yet, this remarkable remnant of sumptuous silk is the very stuff of pirate legend. 

As all good foodies (and school kids on field trips) know, apple-picking time is upon us. Nina Dohanos speaks to a farmer for tips on choosing, storing, and cooking East End apples — the best apples on God's green earth.

Sometimes time telescopes and a personage from one epoch appears in a contemporary context causing cognitive dissonance: Harriet Tubman, for example, lived until the age of the Model T Ford. And so it was perhaps with some puzzlement, if not awe, that Hamptons art-world habitués must have regarded the Ukrainian poet and painter David Burliuk, the “Father of Russian Futurism,” when he appeared in the somewhat poky-prosaic setting of art openings at Guild Hall at midcentury.