This Month’s Film: Travellers and Magicians
Cuisine: Bhutanese

On the 18th of January, I placed an order for a shipment of yak meat with DelYaks, an online supplier. For my ‘Travellers and Magicians’ Bhutanese menu, I ordered two yak filet mignon, two yak rib eye filets, and a pound of lean ground yak to make Momo dumplings. A couple of days later, the site owner, a friendly and attentive yak entrepreneur named Bob, informed me that he was temporarily out of the filets that I ordered and that shipment of them would arrive after the first of next month. So instead, I agreed to allow Bob to choose from among his existing inventory and send me a shipment from what he had in stock. The package shipped on Wednesday the 24th, with a scheduled delivery date of Saturday the 27th. Today.

At about ten minutes to four this afternoon, when the shipment hadn’t arrived, I began to get nervous and called FedEx customer service, where I spent most of an hour trying to explain to a nice young man named Jose, why it was important that the delivery happen today. FedEx doesn’t deliver on Mondays, which means that my yak would be sitting in their warehouse until Tuesday, at which time it will have been on the road for 7 days. After several calls to the warehouse and a dispatch to the driver, I was told that the package was nowhere to be found, either on-site, or on the truck. So there would be no delivery today.

At that point, I decided to call Bob at DelYaks, who amazingly answered his phone at 4:30 on a Saturday afternoon. I explained the situation to him and asked whether the meat would still be safe after so many days in transit. He seemed reasonably sure that it probably would be, but advised me that if it was no longer frozen or cold to the touch, it would not be safe to use. He also checked his records and discovered that the FedEx terminal listed in his tracking report listed Napa as the departure destination, while my tracking report listed Benicia as the departure destination, which might explain why the package could not be located.

So I called FedEx customer service again, and was reassured that the package would definitely arrive today, anytime up until 8 pm. So at 7:45, I was still waiting for a knock on my door. But by that time I had pretty much lost all faith in my yak delivery and had begun to formulate ‘Plan B’, both for this evening’s dinner, and my blog recipes.

When 8 pm came and went, I finally resigned myself to the fact that there would be no yak on my table or my blog today, or tomorrow, or Monday. The soonest FedEx will deliver is Tuesday, seven days afer the package left Montrose, Colorado. Who knew that FedEx would be delivering not a package OF yak, but a package BY yak! I will be genuinely surprised, thunderstruck even, if the meat is still fit for human consumption. But only Tuesday will tell…

So…for tonight’s dinner, I made a pot of lamb curry, steamed some rice, and opened up a fresh jar of mango chutney instead…a delicious end to a very frustrating day. And life goes on…

P.S. I cannot with any conscience, leave out this detail. At around 10:30 pm, I was combing my e-mail for records of my yak delivery and discovered much to my chagrin that I had neglected to remove my old address from my PayPal account, and it was somehow selected as the delivery address. My old address is only a few blocks away, so I sent my son Will over there to investigate whether a yak delivery had been attempted. He returned with the disturbing news that a ‘strung-out meth-head’ lives in my old apartment, my former next-door neighbor knew nothing of an attempted FedEx delivery, and the downstairs neighbors, amid their cloud of marijuana smoke, hadn’t seen or heard anything either.

Fast-forward to Sunday morning, when a call to FedEx revealed that no delivery of the package at either address had been attempted, and a call to DelYaks to request an address update would rectify the situation. So…that’s where things stand until Tuesday…And the lamb curry was delicious BTW…

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