Sometimes you just want to take your time cooking. Letting the tastes combine gradually, over a low, simmering flame. Today I wanted to try this by making a simply curry dish. While the variety of options is endless, I kept the ingredients also to the basics: potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, garlic, spinach, and white cheese. For the spices, of course, I used the trinity of curry, cumin, and kurkuma (that is turmeric in English, but that messes up the alliteration).
I cut the potatoes and sweet potatoes into small chunks, and gave them a quick boil while preparing the pan on minimal heat. No oil at first, just the hot surface with the three spices. When they started to smolder, I added the finely chopped garlic. I gave it some more time.
Then, I let the garlic mix up with the spice powders, and gradually added more. More time... can't rush this dish. Instead, I kept moving it around. Eventually a little bit of oil, and the some onions. Some more spices. More time. Then more onions. More moving around.
After a good amount of time of this, the garlic and the onions got gently toasted, while the powders combined into a nice paste. By this time I had drained the potatoes and sweet potatoes, so I also added them, little by little. The heat remained on the lowest setting, and I always kept stirring and stirring.
More time passed, and the potatoes and sweet potatoes turned into paste too, combining with the spice paste and the onions and garlic. Once everything was added, and nice and pasty, it was time for the spinach and cheese. Of course they were also chopped. It's not like I didn't have enough time to do it!
At this point all I had to do was to wait for the spinach to become tender, and the cheese to get soft. Both happened around the same time, which didn't even take long, compared to the whole dish. Needless to say, I didn't turn the heat up even one bit. In the meantime I also cooked some rice to go with it.
