Cooking for Trippers: Kettle Eggs

There are times in life when you’re faced with the following situation:

1. You’re staying at a hotel/motel (Holiday Inn…) that has a communal BBQ/hotplate for guests to use.
2. You only have basic cooking gear with you, like salt/pepper, knives, forks and plastic plates (for example, because you left all the other stuff with your wife in the desert…)
3. Nonetheless, you bought some eggs to put on the hotplate for breakfast, but they only came in packs of twelve.
4. You only ate 4 of those eggs, and put the rest in the fridge in your room.
5. You have a few beers in the evening, and as a natural result, you’re getting hungry.
6. What do you do?

That’s when the sort of brilliance kicks in that you only exhibit when you’re just drunk enough, yet still completely functional! Here’s what you do: most hotels in Australia have an electric kettle to boil some water to make coffee or tea. Turns out you can perfectly cook your remaining eggs in this kettle, while taking a few precautions.

Step 1: make a very small hole in the bottom of each egg. This will prevent the air inside from expanding too fast, and cracking the shell.

Step 2: Safeguard the eggs from the kettle’s heating element, which will get extremely hot and might cause the eggs to explode in the kettle, making an awful mess. We used a coffee mug, which worked well.

Step 3: Put as many eggs in the kettle as you can safely fit (4 at a time worked for us), and cover them with water.

Step 4: Activate the kettle, and set your phone’s timer for 14 minutes as soon as the water boils.

Step 5: As the kettle will deactivate as soon as the water reaches 100 degrees, you’ll need to re-flip the switch every two minutes or so, to keep the temperature high enough.

Step 6: As soon as the timer hits 14 minutes, pour the eggs out in to the basin, and shower them with cold water (if you neglect to do this, they’ll be very hard to peel).

Enjoy your hard-boiled eggs, and the feeling of satisfaction!