Does your fire detector work?

Last week we checked out the fire detectors and found out that one of them needed a new battery.  New battery installed, pushed the button and it sounded it's alarm.  It always sounds when the button is pushed but will it really work if there was a fire?  Something else for me to obsessive over in my spare time, until today.

In the winter I keep a lot of frozen food in the car to expand our freezer space.  One thing we had in there was a huge turkey, that bad boy was 18 pounds.  One of the local grocery stores starts a turkey card in early November and though the end of December every time you spend $10.00 you get a stamp and after a certain amount of stamps you get a free turkey.  Well every year I don't have room for the behemoth in the freezer, especially so close to just having frozen all the garden produce a few month before.  All winter this works great, expect the last few days we have had temps in the high 30's and 40's.  Mr. Turkey was thawing there in the baked of the van so he needed to be baked up.

I don't have a roaster big enough for a 18 pound bird so I put him in the bottom of the broiler pan and shoved him in the oven.  The broiler pan, while large enough for him, wasn't large enough for all the juice he had in him and it spilled over to the bottom of the oven.  It was late when he got done and so I didn't wipe up the spill after I took him out of the oven.  Oh, who am I kidding, I never wipe up spills in the oven.

This morning Dad was making bacon in the oven.  Lay it out on the broiler pan, pop it in and it makes the best, flat bacon ever and you don't have the mess on the stove top.  This morning while he was making it he went in to check on how it was doing and when he opened the oven door huge billows of smoke came wafting out.  The turkey fat on the bottom of the oven had started on fire.  It was quite good sized, big enough to roast a marshmallow.  I didn't want to put the fire out because last time I had a fire in the oven I poured salt over it and it ruined the heating element, so instead I just let it burn itself out.  Yes, I would have put it out if I thought we were in danger.  All the while it was burning itself out, more and more smoke was filling up the house.  Thankfully it was warm enough to open all the doors and windows today.

During all of this, much to my delight, the smoke detector went off!  Now I can quit obsessing if the thing really works.