It took a while but I believe I can settle on a topic that I truly am interested in. I wasn’t certain until I talked with Thea, but I really feel like it would be interesting to compare the recipes for what people consider to be the “top” foods of Osaka and how they vary across regions, even if some of the opinions are from blogs or videos. Some of the foods that people really like can be found in these lists:

http://www.withhusbandintow.com/foods-to-eat-in-osaka/

https://triplelights.com/blog/10-foodsmust-tryosaka-91

Most notably, I would love to take a look at okonomiyaki (Japanese savory pancake), takoyaki (battered octopus balls), and karaage (fried chicken). I remember the occasion where I walked down a single street in Osaka and every minute, there would be another place selling their own variation of takoyaki or karaage. Similarly, there are many variations on recipes found on the internet as well as well known cookbooks such as Shizuo Tsuji’s Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art which has adapted recipes for cooking in America and Tadashi Ono’s Japanese Soul Cooking, which has recipes from “Tokyo and beyond”. I am also interested in Japanese cookbooks which have been translated rather than written in English first. There is one additional book I’ve found that is interestingly published in both English and Japanese within a single book called Recipes of Japanese Cooking by Yuko Fujita. There is even a documentary called “Wa-shoku ~Beyond Sushi~” which details the westernization of some of these Japanese dishes.

I really would love to see how recipes have changed across regions because I know that I had to adapt my own recipe based on what I could find at HEB.

The only thing I’m not really sure about is if I should stick to those three foods or do less/more. Maybe upon further look at the material.