Salt and pepper shrimp, smothered pork chops, even fish and chips were all fried after speaking with Brown. Slowly, I came up with a better plan for how to get rid of cooking oil in Seattle. I would try to put it in labeled containers so it could be converted to biodiesel, unless I had containers. I would just wipe the pan out with a paper towel and put it in the compost. FryAway will be used for shallow-fry quantities that are too much for paper towels and too little to put in a container. Where you live will affect your solution. If I lived in a place where the only option was to throw it in the trash, I would probably use FryAway for anything but quantities I could wipe up with a paper towel.

I tried to cook with the oil more than once in order to fully capture its value. She said that if you use it twice you need half as much.

When I lived in Barcelona, they did not do as much out-and-out fried food as we do in the United States, but they were more prone to cook a pound or two of it. I was surprised that people would have dinner and then pour the used cooking oil into a container near the stove to be used again and again. Fryalators at your favorite burger joint are not like the ones that change the oil after every onion ring.

Carme Gasull is a food writer and screenwriter who is on a new cooking show.

She gestured to her eyes and nose when I asked how long she would keep it.

She says that with potatoes, the oil stays clean, but with croquettes, it goes faster, because of the bread crumbs, flour, and cheese that fall to the bottom of the pan.

The city of Barcelona provides cooking-oil recycling containers, which can be filled up and swapped out for empty ones at recycling centers, because the reuse of cooking oil is so ingrained into life.

She says that every Wednesday a truck comes to the neighborhood for a few hours and they can bring stuff like used cooking oil, clothes, and electronics to be recycled.

FryAway was great for jobs that were too much for a paper-towel wipe up and not enough to fit in a gallon container. It will depend on what you cook and how you dispose of it. FryAway gives us one more reason not to pour oil down the drain, even if we don't have little trucks that show up in our neighborhood and cart our oil away. It could help keep the banana peels off the roofs.