Hi Martin and welcome. Good intro by the way and sounds like you should chip into the "what's for dinner tonight Josephine" thread and show us a few masterchef level dishes, to see what you can teach us while we are teaching you about curry.
Couple of suggestions from me - first, don't give up on visiting your new favourite curry house, keep in touch with them and see if you can blag your way into the kitchen as there's no better way to learn than to see it first hand. If you've read up on recipes and techniques from this site you'll be able to cross reference and put some of the info here into context better hopefully.
Secondly, more and more people are discovering BIR these days as the info slowly spreads throughout the Internet. That's a good thing but it means there's some reet dodgy info sources out there. If you are to achieve good results you must be selective. Avoid ebook authors and "YouTube sensations" who can't and never could cook a decent curry. Try to spot and be wise to the narcissistic novices who showed up on this site one minute and the next were posting recipes for the "ultimate" this and the "best ever" that, with shouty thread titles which attract pages of follow up comments, but which, ultimately, will disappoint. Forums have a strange dynamic and some posters have a way of leading people by the nose.
Last word of advice. Cooking a BIR curry is like building a house. You have to get the foundations right. It's all very well tinkering with the colour of the roof tiles but if the foundations are dodgy it's gonna be a crap house. Don't get distracted into the discussions of the finer points of the spice blend or spiced oil, or bunjarra or the endless search to achieve "the taste" - just get your foundations right.
Foundations of BIR flavour are as follows: onions cooked on a good rolling boil for long enough during your base sauce recipe so they're ready to fall apart; turmeric (the definitive base flavour spice in BIR cookery) cooked with the onions as part of the base sauce recipe for long enough that it mellows and sweetens; base sauce comprised mainly of onions, with just 10% or less of other veg; plentiful spices seared in hot oil when cooking the final dish (use more spice than you think and don't be afraid of burning them - BIR chefs do not pussy around) and lastly, dilute your base sauce down and cook your curry for a good ten to fifteen mins, don't try to get it made in six or seven. You do not have a commercial range at home so adjust and cook that curry longer and ignore it like a good BIR chef with 15 things on the go does. Let it settle and stick to the pan for five mins at a time.
You can quickly start to achieve good results by getting some things right, but getting a full-on harmony of BIR delight requires all the building blocks to line up at once. Be selective with what you believe on here, including this post I guess......
