Weekend Eating:
Mobile Cooking

with Suzzanna Decantworthy
additional research: Sean McCleanaugh

Many students, and other young people, have little in the way of cooking skills but can usually get their hands on a couple of mobile phones. So, this week, we show you how to use two mobile phones to cook an egg which will make a change from phoning out for a pizza. Please note that this will not work with cordless phones.

To do this you will need two mobile phones -they do not have to be on the same network but you will need to know the number of one of them. The only other items you will need are:

1. An egg cup, (make sure that the egg cup is made of an insulating material such as China, wood or glass - plastic will do. DO NOT use stainless steel or other metal).
2. A radio, AM or FM - you can also use your hifi.

3. A table or other flat surface on which to place the phones and egg cup. You can place the radio anywhere in the room but you might as well put it on the table.




How To Do It:

1. Take an egg from the fridge and place it in the egg cup in the centre of the table.

2. Switch on the radio or hifi and turn it up to a comfortable volume.

3. Switch on phone A and place it on the table such that the antenna (the pokey thing at the top) is about half an inch from the egg (you may need to experiment to get the relative heights correct - paperbacks are good if you have any - if not you may be able to get some wood off cuts from your local hardware shop).

4. Switch on phone B and ring phone A then place phone B on the table in a similar but complementary position to Phone A.

5. Answer phone A - you should be able to do this without removing it from the table. If not, don't panic, just return the phone to where you originally placed on the table.

6. Phone A will now be talking to Phone B whilst Phone B will be talking to Phone A.

7. Cooking time: This very much depends on the power output of your mobile phone. For instance, a pair of mobiles each with 2 Watts of transmitter output will take three minutes to boil a large free range egg. Check your user manual and remember that cooking time will be proportional to the inverse square of the output power for a given distance from egg to phone.

8. Cut out these instructions for future reference.

Note: We cooked our egg during the evening using free local calls, if you were to cook an egg for lunch it would cost £3.00 - not cheap but you do have the convenience.