Hey I don't know why you need to know this--maybe you are an investigative journalist reporting on homelessness in America. If so then right on! But also if you need this advice then let me say, take care of yourself, and good luck.

With that out of the way: congratulations! You're homeless, and the food pantry gave you eggs! I can't imagine any other scenario in which you need to boil eggs while homeless, because I certainly wouldn't waste EBT/SNAP/food stamps on purchasing a dozen raw eggs in this economy. So yeah the food pantry gave you eggs you were like, sure, fuck me up, I'll try to find a way to make this work. We did this too! And this is how it worked for us.

Okay first of all you need to protect your eggs. We did this with this nice handy travel egg holder by a brand that was on a label that I threw away and will never be able to find again. It was at a Kroger store. I'm sure you can find one if you seek it out. Anyway we got the money for purchasing it by telling tumblr how much it sucks to cook food when you live in a car. It could be collecting cans, it could be busking. Use good judgment and be safe. Or just find a different, more cost-effective way to keep your eggs intact. Since tumblr in its infinite mercy and grace gave us this egg holder in which to secure our huevos, I just feel like I need to spend a paragraph reviewing the egg holder. Then I'll start teaching you how we boiled the eggs, and you can evaluate whether our method works for your current lifestyle and/or will go into your tell-all expose on homelessness. And after that, I will promote my ko-fi link in the hopes that one of you wants me to have more coffee shop time to write more of these infotainments. Ready? Let's go!

This is the paragraph where I review the egg holder. Hey, I really put it through its paces actually, because we got a big ol box of food from the food pantry the same day as we got the egg holder. And we needed to put that box of food underneath a bunch of big heavy things because you have to move all the objects in a car in one place if you want to sleep in parts of it. I could have put the egg crate in our ice chest and it would have been fine. But I wanted to know. How much protection did it really offer eggs? How much could we depend on it? Anyway under a mountain of stuff this thing kept all the raw eggs uncracked. (By the way I would not have done this unless I was confident that it would not cause a bad mess. Placement was in my favor to contain any egg goo.) The carry handle is okay, I think it could be bigger. I'm not sure if I trust the tiny clasp to stay in place when being jostled about, so try to put this thing in a secure area where it can't wiggle around. I would prefer an actual clasp that clamps over the top but that probably would have meant it costing more. Overall I would say this is excellent to keep your eggs in for travel purposes, and it has a very low space profile so it doesn't take up much space when you're not using it. Highly recommended.

Now let's cook some eggs! We did this with an electric kettle. This is something you can secure for yourself if you want to--otherwise you're gonna need another way of boiling water. Try to get something that's low profile and survives getting bumped around. You want to avoid glass or easily-crackable plastic. Mine's all metal.

There's a few places that we can find that we can plug in a kettle without anyone coming up to stop us from doing that. Public parks with grills and rentable party spaces often have an electric outlet somewhere, and if you show up when the space isn't reserved, you can just use that. A public pool center we found provides lockable shower/changing rooms that have a sink and electric outlet in the room for hair dryers, etc. We go on off days when we won't be keeping anyone out of a changing room, then run the kettle while also using the facilities for hygiene.

So how do you do this? Put the eggs in the kettle and then pour water to the max fill line. (I do six eggs at a time so there's enough water in the kettle to boil them all, so a dozen eggs takes two rounds of this.) Turn on the kettle and wait for the kettle to be done boiling the water. (It's good to time your kettle so you know how long this usually takes.) Once it's done, set a timer for the eggs to stay in the hot water. We're sticking with fifteen minutes for now--what works will vary with your kettle and how well-insulated it is, and also how hard you want your eggs.

Once the timer goes off, pour your eggs out, trying to take care not to crack any. We had one get dented in this batch on the way out. Just eat those first!

If you run cold water into the kettle and rinse it around after the first batch, you can cool the sides of the inside of the kettle and it'll be easier to put the eggs in for the second batch without burning your hand. When you are done you can put them in a little egg holder if you have one!

After this it just depends on what you're doing with the eggs and how you like them. You don't have to do this in the same facilities we've done, either--it's really just about getting creative and thinking about what resources are available to you in different spaces you can access. I find the big thing is being discreet and not getting in anyone's way, because if no one knows you're secretly cooking eggs at the gym, no one cares and no one gets hurt. But when people find out you're doing this stuff they can get pretty weird and ask you to stop that and go away, so stay aware of who is observing you when you're doing stuff like this.