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Huge dessert threatens city
DANGER! Children and a male were cooking. Mom fled, having premonitions of disaster. I couldn't blame her. Having used every container in the kitchen, I left the room to scour the apartment for vases and toothbrush mugs to press into service.
Big mistake! When I returned, the children were cooking an astonishingly large amount of macaroni.
"We're hungry," they said. I told them that macaroni expanded. A lot! Five minutes later, we transferred the overflowing pasta into a larger pot, and then into several huge pots. Half an hour later, we had enough pasta to feed Italy for a year.
My wife returned, surveyed the damage, and expressed bafflement as to why anyone would want to cook several cubic meters of macaroni. I suggested we let it harden and then sell it as building material to property developers making stadiums.
The scene reminded her of a book in the kids' room, The Magic Cooking Pot, a fairytale about an overflowing porridge pot which floods a village. But it reminded me of a true story: the Great Pudding Bomb of Wales. It's a tale worth repeating.
Your humble narrator spent a year as a student reporter in a harbour city called Cardiff in the UK. On arrival, locals told me in hushed terms about the day the city was almost engulfed by a giant pudding.
A huge cargo ship from Thailand, carrying timber and 1,500 tons of raw tapioca, arrived at the dockside one day. Sailors told dockworkers the timber had
caught fire and been burning for several days. The fire service arrived and started spraying it with water to put the flames out. But after hours of soaking, the only development was a series of strange creaking noises from the ship.
Onlookers suddenly realised what was happening. The flames and water had turned the ship into a giant steam oven and were cooking the tapioca, which was expanding into a massive dessert. "It's like a huge tapioca timebomb," gasped the fire chief.
It became clear that the cargo would turn into the biggest pudding the world had ever seen and either sink the ship or explode out of it, possibly engulfing the city dockyards. City officials calculated that the dessert would fill more than a million plates.
Police wracked their brains about what warnings should be issued. "Evacuate the district. This is a giant killer dessert warning. Move to higher ground. A very large pudding may be approaching at high speed."
(I know this sounds like an urban legend, but I swear it's true.)
In the end, fire-fighters managed to soak the timber and remove it from the ship, halting the cooking of the explosive pudding.
But back to the present day. Another food miracle happened: In just five days, my children and their friends managed to consume that mountain of pasta. "How can children eat something bigger than they are?" my wife asked. "Quantum physics," I replied.
But if there's ever another giant pudding disaster at sea, I know how to solve the problem.
Make a million plates of dessert vanish? Kids, we have a job for you.
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