Kitchen Appliances You Can’t Live Without – Riggs’ Top 5

Honestly, I use my rice cooker more than I use my toaster. Perfectly lazy for me in every way to just dump in any kind of rice, dump in some water and walk away from it. It'll go from cook to heat once it's finished. I make a ton of sushi and spam musubi and there's no way I could make it happen without my rice cooker.

Milkshakes are like sandwiches, to me. Super easy to make and you can make just about anything you want out of it. Just grab some vanilla ice cream, if you have a specific flavor you wanna try, add those ingredients and go for it. My kids are fond of the chocolate banana shake which is just a banana sliced in with hershey's syrup. Then again, it's a milkshake so I think they would be fond of anything I can mix up. I bought one of these bad boys for my wife (really, for me) for less than $15 if I remember correctly.

Yes, the George Foreman grill. There's a ton of crap that people are trying to sell you on TV - many of those crappy items are pitched to you from well known celebrities. This one is actually something worth buying. I won't bother making anything fancy in it. I've tried steak, chicken and pork chops. Yeah, it works okay, but these George Foreman grills are perfect for frozen hamburger patties. You've seen'em at the store in the freezer section, a perfect silo of frozen disks of meat. I'll turn it on, plop a couple down and when it beeps, they're ready to grub on. It does come in handy to pre-cook something like chicken that I'm just going to chop up and throw it in a stir-fry or something.

I'm a black pepper freak. If you eat anything I make, more than likely it'll contain as much black pepper as Emril uses garlic. I gotta have it freshly grounded if I can, I hate those pepper flakes you find at most diners. I also don't want to use the Olive Garden-style phallic-shaped twisty-knobby thing. The best solution are these squeezable pepper grinders. My wife's grandparents had them and bought me one for Christmas. You can find'em at Target amongst other places, I'm sure. You can grind just about anything with them, but for me, it's the only think I'll use to grind black pepper.

There are a ton of waffle irons on the market and I own 3 different ones. I have a flat iron that works all right if you want 'eggo' sized waffles. I have a Belgium waffle maker to make big-ass waffles. It's the kind that rotates like you find at "free continental breakfast" hotels where you pour the waffle batter in yourself. But, for me, it's all about the Hello Kitty waffle maker and for good reason. First of all, waffles are super-easy to make. Just mix flower with anything else, liquify it until it becomes an oozing glob and pour it on a hot iron plate. But these are Hello Kitty shaped faces so you can also live out your dream of eating Hello Kitty and all of her friends faces off. That and my kids love it. Any time I can make something cheap that they love to eat works for me.