You just stumbled onto one of the great hacks of Indian cooking: Onion Masala base. https://myheartbeets.com/indian-onion-masala/ try the butter paneer in this series - so easy, so good.
On one hand, it would be nice for us to drop the smart plug here, but at least those can be entirely local-only. I highly doubt any device API would be local.
Well, we have both location gated and time gated populations, so observational study should be fairly trivial.