Domo Arigato

As it turns out, my earlier thought of visiting a local sushi restaurant was a good idea. While sitting around this evening wondering what we would do for dinner, we decided on sushi. Our neighborhood restaurant has been a long time favorite of ours, so we loaded up and headed over.

After dinner, the owner happened to walk by so we called her over to the table. We, of course, mentioned that we have been eating there for a number of years, and then asked boldly what they did with the vegetable oil that they use for their tempura. To my surprise, she said they change the fryers once per week and they fill up between 3 and 4 of the 4.5 gallon jugs normally. She said that a company was supposed to bring them a container to put the oil in so it could be disposed of, but they never brought it. She didn't say so, but I suspect that they were just throwing the jugs of oil in the dumpster. I think maybe she was afraid to say that because it's probably illegal.

Anyway, she asked what I wanted to do with the oil. When I told her, she got this perplexed look on her face and asked "Are you sure you can do that?". I wasn't quite sure how to answer her. Did she mean "is it legal" or did she mean "are you sure your car can run on veggie oil". I suspected the latter, so I explained to her about the conversion of the Merzola and that I was looking to recycle veggie oil to "help the environment". Of course that is my primary motivation, duh.

Getting down to details, she wasn't quite sure which day they emptied the fryer so we agreed that I should call her on Wednesday to discuss. Man, I gotta tell ya, if this works out, 15 gallons of pretty clean tempura oil each week will be more than enough to support my normal driving habits and probably enough to slowly begin to stockpile oil to accommodate my next road trip. This is kind of like getting a grant to do research. Does that make me a scientist?