Curry Recipe Experiment

I'm lazy where food prep is concerned, if that's not become apparent by now. I like dishes and condiments which can be prepared with a minimum of fuss and bother. To illustrate: I like curry, a lot. I have a jar of red curry paste in the fridge. But to use it, I usually just put a dollop of ketchup on a plate, drop a teaspoon of curry paste on top, and mash it in with a fork. Voila! Instant curry sauce!

This evening, however, I decided to try to make something approaching an authentic curry sauce, albeit with no advance preparation. I looked on the web, and found this recipe. Okay, do we have any cream? No. Do I want to make a full-fledged white sauce? No. But there is some condensed milk in the cupboard! Now, this is an experiment, so I don't want to make the full recipe, but I don't want to try scaling things down mathematically (this never works anyway), so I just dump a teaspoon of curry paste into a bowl with about half of the condensed milk and warm it in the microwave (a saucepan on the stove would also be too much work).

After the warming, it looks rather thin, so I look at the recipe and see the flour. I add some white flour I find in the cabinet and stir it up. Kinda better, but still runny. More flour. Now it's getting to be the consistency of curry sauce as I know it. Time to heat it up again. After about a minute I pull the bowl out. Uh oh. The flour has more or less cooked, and I now have something that can best be described as a Curry Muffin.

More condensed milk, vigorous stirring and minor heating pass, and I now have a passable curry sauce.

Lesson: at least have the right ingredients on hand, and try to mimic the proportions in the recipe. I might try this recipe again in a week or two after actually shopping for the ingredients...