Curd

The best curd (aka yogurt) apparently comes from Bhaktapur. It comes in a unglazed clay pot with a film of wax paper on top from a little grocery on the road. The clay pot is considered disposable. When you're done with it, you chuck it and it eventually dissolves back into the mud. Bhaktapur is an artisans town in the Kathmandu Valley where they also make the pots.

Curd is given to people for luck on special occassions - like Hindi weddings. It's is also a good snack and can come as a side to the Nepali national dish dahl baht. It's pretty sweet and tastes really good with ripe mangos. The mangos are Indian mangos and taste a little different from the ones that come from Mexico. But it's still yummy nonetheless!

This is Cheese?

Yak cheese is made by boiling the curds from the churning process then drying the boiled "cheese" in either the sun (for white cheese) or smoke (for brown cheese).

My advice - don't try to bite the cheese. It's comparable to a rock. Instead, you eat the cheese by pulling a piece off the string, sticking the whole piece in your mouth, and sucking. Be prepared to suck on this piece of cheese for several hours. Eventually it becomes kind of sandy feeling (got to love the pun).

It has a pretty mellow taste, which is nice because in this country they consider chilis to be a vegetable. Everything except the cheese and tea seems to be made with lip burning, eye watering, oh my god can I even breathe chilis. One of the favorite dishes is ema datse - chilis with cheese. This dish is eaten three times a day. Fortunately, in ema datse, the cheese is melted so you don't have to suck on it for several hours!