Haven't thought about caramelizing the apples. Will probably experiment with that. When slow cooking I do caramelize the onions on a pad next to the pot.
This time I added them with the potatos, the last 15 minutes. So that they are soft but not too mushy
Yeah, it is Japanese style curry. Roughly following the steps in from Just One Cookbokookbook. Normally we just use chicken for a quick (~15 minutes) curry. But occasionally I grab a fatty (and tough to save $$$) peace of meat and slow cook for 4-6 hours.
One difference from the above recipe is that I put the [golden] curry blocks at the end to avoid burning the spices.