My Lifesaving Granola

Hey everyone, it's Karen here and I'd like to offer a public service announcement: when daylight saving time occurred on November 5th, you were not only supposed to change your clocks, but you were also supposed to change the batteries in your smoke detector. Quote ironically, my recent granola-baking experience made me keenly aware of just how important this is.

I make a homemade batch of granola almost every week and have been doing so for several months. I have it down to a science. Or so I thought. Not long ago, as a batch of granola was baking, I decided I would also bake some muffins - why not take advantage of the oven already being on, right? I would just have to change the temperature of the oven when the granola was done because the muffins needed a higher temperature. I was so proud of my efficiency! 

When the timer went off indicating the granola was done baking, I turned off the timer and, instead of taking the granola out of the oven, I increased the temperature of the oven. About 20 minutes later, I smelled something burning. I realized I never took the granola out of the oven! I opened the oven and smoke poured out. The granola was jet black. 

While wallowing in my disappointment about the granola, I realized that the smoke detector never went off. After some troubleshooting, my husband and I realized that the batteries were dead in the alarm closest to the kitchen. When was the last time we replaced the batteries in any of our smoke detectors? We had no idea. We always relied on the "chirping" to tell us when to replace the batteries, but apparently, that is not a reliable method. We ended up replacing all of the smoke detectors in the house with those fancy 25-year battery ones since it was clear we couldn't trust ourselves to replace batteries with any regularity. 

The incinerated granola quickly turned into a lifesaving event. It kinda scares me to think about all the other "what-ifs" and I consider us lucky to have learned our lesson the easy way. So, the lesson of this story is to keep an eye on that granola and keep your smoke alarm batteries fresh!