I followed this recipe of beef vindaloo, last night, triple checking everything written there. Since I don't have a spice grinder, I put the chopped onions, chopped tomatoes, salt and spices in a mixie and converted it into a fine paste. Then poured it into a container which had 1kg cleaned beef pieces, poured 250ml of vinegar (the recipe says 250ml for 0.5kg beef, but I felt pouring 500ml for 1kg of beef is too much).    It's been marinated in a fridge overnight. Today morning the beef seems a bit tough when I squeeze it. I thought it's supposed to turn tender.    Anyway, now the recipe asks me to use the marinade for frying the beef a bit. This confuses me.     How is beef going to get fried (even though there will be 8tbsp of oil), when the marinade contains a good amount of water from the tomatoes and onions?   Every other recipe I have known, the tomatoes are only added after the frying takes place. I've never known tomatoes being used in marination. Is this really something that works?   Every other recipe calls for the onions to be fried along with the spices. Is onion really blended into a paste and used for marination?   Now that I have a rather large quantity of marinade full of onion and tomato, will that ruin the taste of the curry because the onion paste might not actually get fried?   Should I (instead of trying to fry the marinade), take some fresh onions, chop them up with some ginger and garlic and fry them in oil until golden brown, and take the beef pieces separately and fry it for a while (until the outsides are brown) with the onions, ginger and garlic and later add the entire marinade to make a curry?     Somehow I feel that if I just follow the rest of the recipe on that page, the curry will get messed up. 
That seems normal.  All the "raw" means is that it was extracted from the honeycomb without significant heating. It's liquid to start with in the honeycomb, so it's normal for it to still be liquid when you get it. I don't know if I'd call it runny, it should still generally be a pretty thick, slow-flowing liquid, but it's not a paste.  The color is mostly just a function of what the bees were gathering. Dark is often more flavorful, probably a good thing, but depends on your tastes. Mass-produced honey is very often lighter, and wildflower honey (where the bees just get whatever they want) is very often darker.  I've definitely seen plenty of raw, unfiltered honey that looks liquid and roughly the darkness of the raw honey you bought, judging by the picture in the linked page. If anything, it's probably more common to find dark unfiltered honey, because the filtering can lighten it up a bit.  The "paste" you linked to looks like it's crystallized/creamed. There are a lot of tiny sugar crystals, making it thicker and opaque, which tends to make it look a bit lighter too. (It's not completely smooth, like "perfect" creamed honey, but it's a lot smoother than uncontrolled crystallization, so I think it's fair to call it creamed.) Raw, unfiltered honey does crystallize more easily, because it has more imperfections in it to jump-start crystallization, so it's not entirely surprising to see raw honey in that form. But raw honey certainly doesn't have to be that way. 