Affogato + lox-on-pumpernickel for a day off
Good eats and drinks in Northeastern PA
It was Wednesday, our day off at camp, a funny concept when one is accustomed to time off on weekends, although Fridays and Saturdays don’t always feel very vacation-y.
But I do love a camp day off, when you’re freed from the boundaries of camp, its rules and bylaws for a bunch of hours. There were the days off of my youth, when you had to first locate a ride out of camp, and then got to spend the day with friends, eating meals out and seeing a summer flick, picking up Twizzlers and junk food on the way home. We got more sophisticated over the years, buying tickets to Grateful Dead shows and CSNY concerts, including the 20th year anniversary of Woodstock (that was a great t-shirt), and generally getting back to camp in the wee hours, sometimes having a few too many adventures, if you know what I mean.
These days, it’s about a slightly more relaxed schedule, and the pleasures of having a day with fewer responsibilities and no real timetable.
Our crew of four didn’t have a serious plan, but we wanted to visit Moka Origins, the small batch chocolate and coffee company in nearby Bethany, followed by lunch at Camp Umpy’s in Honesdale, one of my favorite bagel places.
As I mentioned in my last post, Moka is the boutique roaster and retailer established in a former dairy barn on the grounds of the Himalayan Institute, a yoga and meditation retreat in northeastern Pennsylvania, about 40 minutes from camp.
Our camp has a close relationship with Jeff Abella, the former Madison, Wisconsonian who established Moka with his wife, Chelsea, and several others, as part of the institute’s humanitarian efforts to help subsistence farmers find better ways to earn money and support themselves under better conditions.
Staffers drink Moka coffee every morning (and their nitro brew in the afternoon) and our older campers visit Moka during the summer to learn about and make chocolate in the clean, welcoming space that includes a welcoming barista and small shop.
I’ve gotten friendly with Jeff and Chelsea over the last few years, after interviewing them for the New York Times and a ToI podcast. I feel a sense of kinship with them because they remind me of Israeli entrepreneurs, with that similar sense of mission and drive. Their life is more than a little similar to that of a kibbutznik, given that they live on the grounds of the Himalayan Institute, can eat all their meals — although they don’t — in the vegetarian dining room, and are building this company for the sake of their larger community and its farmers.
We headed there to see what was new since last summer, and, obviously, to drink some coffee. Given that only two of our group of four are coffee drinkers, we were pleased to find out that Moka is trying out ice cream, partnering with a Philadelphia creamery known as Owowcow, one of the few creameries in the region that doesn’t have additives in their ice cream.
There’s no ice cream in the Wayne County region that doesn’t have dyes or fillers or high fructose corn syrup, said Chelsea, and this Moka experiment is only two weeks old. She offered us tastes from her first round of flavors, including a Tanzanian cherry, a Triple Chocolate with white chocolate chunks, coffee ice cream with Ugandan chocolate swirl and my personal favorite, mint chocolate chip. All fresh, creamy and not overly sweet, unusual to find in ice cream.
I had an affogato espresso with a scoop of mint chocolate chip — no green food coloring in this version — and it was divine. Ditto for the frozen hot chocolate tried by two of my fellow travelers that included an additional scoop of vanilla ice cream. Spectacular.
We bought our bundle of five chocolate bars and one free, including my favorite lemon ginger flavor, some coffee for friends and a new mug for me, and took our leave, first relaxing in those Adirondack chairs set up in Moka’s Sound of Music field while drinking our coffees.
Once we’d digested a bit, we headed to Camp Umpy’s Bagels and Stuff, located on Main Street of Honesdale, a small town that still retains a downtown in this era of Walmart and other superstores, albeit with some empty storefronts, but with a bunch of funky eateries and shops that attest to the slow flow of city folk who have made their way here in the last 10-15 years, particularly from Brooklyn, or so we’ve heard.
Umpy’s, as it’s known, is owned and run by Cheryl Batcher, a former Long Islander who’s been in Honesdale for about a dozen years. Her bagels are pretty great, and I’m offering that opinion as a former New Yorker. They’re chewy, flavorful and not too big, and she has some funky flavors, including Spinach, Asiago, Black Russian (my personal fave) and Pretzel bagels, along with the more usual options.
The bagels are made in Newark, New Jersey but baked and boiled in Honesdale with imported spring water from nearby Fox Ledge for that sense of local flavor. I partook of the Lox-N-Loaded sandwich, layered with fresh nova scotia lox, cream cheese, capers, tomato, and red onions. Love the capers especially, which seems to be a new — to me -- addition since moving to Israel 28 years ago.
And let’s be honest, you don’t expect to find a bagel like this on Main Street in Honesdale.
What was the rest of the day off, you ask? A stop at the Weis supermarket for some odds and ends, and my brother-in-law and I got excited when we saw that a TJ Maxx had opened in the same strip mall, but, turned out, is only opening a few weeks from now.
So we paid for our Polar seltzers and headed home, back over the country lanes and back roads where cows grazed and horses hung out and where there are more than a few Vote Trump or DeSantis signs on front lawns. Back at camp, I put in a load of laundry, picked up my book and took a little snooze.
It wasn’t a day of tailgating at Giant Stadium with the Grateful Dead, my twenty-something self and my camp buddies, but it was some time off from regular life, with simple pleasures and good company. Wishing something like that for all of you out there. Thanks for reading.