Tibetan Cheese or Chura
I can imagine that many of you might think that I have disappeared for good and I am sure that you are right in thinking that but for me I simply had no energy to write a blog after a sudden change in my schedule due to a number of factors most of them being related to the amount of things I have to do in a day. Anyway I have enjoyed my time away from the blog, I will admit it. I am sure that now I will have a bit more to write about for the coming few days though the frequency may be a bit less at the beginning.
Some days ago I came across two big blocks of hard Tibetan Cheese called “Chura”. This type of cheese mostly eaten as a sort of a hard candy. I remember from my college days my deskmate was addicted to eatiing this cheese and he always had a couple of cubes of this in his pocket and one permanently in his mouth. This deskmate was always “high” and had a cricket kit bag full of hemp in his college hostel room. However he was fun to be around and had an extraordinary level of intelligence. So the cheese itself is pretty disgusting and there are many types of it. If I had to describe its taste I would say it tastes like rancid vomit but there is one particular variety that is shaped like flakes and if you throw those in a soup it gives a very nice flavour to it. I must admit my liking for Chura stops there. However this along with dried meat called Sha-Khambu has an extraordinary role to play in the Tibetan diet. This type of food hardly goes bad and it provides for a good source of protien in a climate where such type of nourishment is difficult to get especially while you travel for days. This is such a good travel food that they almost always string a couple of cubes of it together and you can carry it handily in your pocket without the fear of spoilage.
As for these particular pieces of chura, I plan to nibble on them even though its not really very tasty for me. Slowly but surely I am sure they will disappear.
