Here is how I made my curry. In my frying pan I did this:   Added olive oil (maybe one and a half teaspoon) Added garlic (minced from a jar) Added about one teaspoon of ground turmeric, ground coriander, and ground cumin Added veggies   I stirred and after a while I noticed there was something odd. The ground spices on top of the veggies wouldn't go away, no matter how much I tried to stir and how much more olive oil I added.   What did I do wrong? 
In most Indian restaurants, one only sees the gravy based curries. This is just one side of Indian cooking. For dry curries, the technique is totally different.  For most dry curries, you temper whole spices in hot oil (traditionally sunflower, mustard, canola or groundnut oil). After tempering, the vegetables are added (usually one one kind at a time in a curry or maximum two). Then you add salt and other ground spices and let the vegetables cook.  Depending on whether you desire a north Indian style or a south indian style curry, you would add slightly different whole/ground spices.  Your curry did not come out well for some of these reasons:   Too much turmeric. Turmeric is for color/nutrition properties, but a pinch or two should suffice. A whole tablespoon would only be required if you are cooking like 5 pounds of vegetables. The olive oil's flavor does not really blend well with traditional Indian spice mixes, so you should try different oil. Also olive oil doesn't get hot enough to temper mustard seeds and the like and might start to smoke if heated too much. The ground spices should be added to the vegetables and not the oil, as many others have pointed out.   Having eaten south indian curries all my life, the traditional tempering ingredients are mustard seeds, dry lentils(to give a bit of crunch). For the ground spices, usual is a pinch of turmeric, salt, chilli powder(can be substituted with dry/fresh chillies) and asafoetida(for an umami note).  North indian curries have a tendency to include onions to most curries and have mustard seeds, cumin powder, coriander powder, fennel seeds and of course chilli powder.  This is the basic technique for dry curries, and you can use most vegetables, from potatoes to beans to green peppers, though as I mentioned earlier, traditional curries just have one or two vegetables at a time. 