Japan Budget Cooking

It's been ages since I last time wrote something, so I decided to bore you with my culinary experiments a little. I'm still waiting patiently for my beloved to come to Japan (10 days!!!), and we're gonna do some travelling then, so I will have some interesting stuff to write about.
Now - I'm sitting alone in the office, no guests today, so what's a bored girl like me to do?
I wrote before that I'm learning how to cook some Japanese dishes - now I'm inventing new ways to make traditional meals and trying to spend as little money as I can. Today I made okara croquettes.

Okara is the stuff that's left after making tofu; it looks a bit like white cheese. It's really, REALLY cheap (you can buy a whole bag for 60 yen) and very healthy. In Kyoto you can buy it in a shop specialising in tofu; I'm lucky, because my karate sensei owns such a shop.

Ingredients:

- Okara with black beans ~300g / 60 yen
- Kinpira (I used lotus roots, carrot and sesame seeds from lawson100 ;)) 75g/105 yen
- 1/4 onion/15 yen
- 1 egg/17,5 yen
- broccoli sprouts/30 yen
- vegetable oil (at home)
- bread crumbs (at home)

I used broccoli sprouts only because I bought them yesterday on sale for 90 yen (half price) and I used about 1/3 of the box. I figured I have to eat them soon, or they'll go bad. Can't have pissed off Dark Side broccoli sprouts after me, can I?

How to make it?

1. Chop the onion into small pieces and fry it for about 3 minutes (don't burn it!). Put it in a bowl afterwards.
2. Chop the kinpira.
3. Chop broccoli sprouts.
4. Squash okara into small pieces in a bowl.
5. Add the egg. Mix all ingredients. It should look like that:
6. Form croquettes and coat them with bread crumbs.
7. Pour some oil onto the frying pan, wait for it to heat up and put the croquettes in the oil.
8. Fry until they become light brown.
9. Dig in.

This serves 2-3 people, costs about 230 yen and is delicious!