Cooking 101: Hard boiled eggs

I know I'm not chef material but, I am able in the kitchen. I can whip up a dish with minimal effort, follow a recipe easily or even invent my own dish. Although I admit I don't like baking (because it's very precise), I am really not a stranger in the kitchen.

However, last night, I discovered, I don't know how to boil egg! Yes. Embarassing as it may be, I don't know how. My goodness!

I needed boiled eggs to garnish a noodle dish. I threw in 3 eggs in a pan with water and let it boil. I don't know how many minutes passed, seemed like more than 5 minutes, when I checked, the water was boiling and one of the eggs' shell had cracked. So I figured, the eggs had been boiled.

I drenched the eggs with tap water to cool it down, peeled the shell off, and horror of horrors (!!!), this is how all three looked.

Since I can't use soft boiled eggs for my dish, I had to boil eggs again. This time, I made sure A LOT of time elapsed before I put out the fire -- even if the egg shells cracked...again!. For what seemed like forever, I let the eggs cool down and peeled them. Thank goodness, they were boiled. Whew! (For a while there, I thought it'll end up over boiled --if there is such a thing.)

While hubby and I enjoyed our dinner last night (Mee Siam! Yum! Yum!), I still don't know the formula of making hard boiled eggs! Can somebody please tell me? I don't want to eat more than one soft boiled egg for breakfast again. Or at least tell me what else I can do with soft boiled eggs aside from eating it as is.