$25, Amazon Prime Corgi Earrings

Tea infuser. $10 manatee, $7 little man, $2 generic ball, $10 "Tea" Rex.

My kitchen is pretty full of various devices. Let's see:

• Asian hot water pot. I love tea, so it's nice to just hold the "dispense" button and get a mug of boiling water.
• Speaking of tea, skip tea bags (unless you're using these for your own tea, which you probably only need for really fine stuff like chamomile). Instead I use this tea infuser, which works great for most teas. This one isn't very good at infusing tea, but it is really cute.
• Prefer coffee? Get a French press; it's pretty cheap and it's way better than drop coffee. You just need a cheap coffee grinder so you can have fresh grounds.
• Yes, I said a cheap coffee grinder. You can upgrade to a nice burr grinder later, and that will free up your cheap blade grinder for spice duty!
• Asian rice cooker with fuzzy logic. I manage to burn rice on the stove, and the dumb mechanical rice cookers are no better. This thing is fantastic, and useful for more than just plain white rice. Mixed or brown rice, jambalaya, etc...
• Toaster oven. I end up using this a lot, either to cook small meals (pizza bites, or breakfast (two slices of bacon, two frozen fried chicken strips, two frozen biscuits, 20 minutes at 375)) or for actually toasting things (I insist on toasting hamburger and hot dog buns).
• Kitchen scale. I'm using a crappy spring model, but soon I intend to get a decent electronic one. Just read this article from NYT if you're not convinced of why a scale should be a must-have. I'll probably buy the scale suggested by Cooking for Engineers.
• Microplane grater. I just bought it, and it rocks. Citrus zest, cheese, nutmeg...
• Tongs. I don't know how I got by for so long without them.
• Cast iron skillet. It's easily my favorite pan to cook in, because I can do so much with it.
• Do you need a pepper grinder? Get the Unicorn 9" Magnum Black. Nevermind what it sounds like, just buy this one; don't even bother shopping around for others. It's that good.
• Instant-read thermometer. I don't know if I recommend the exact one I have (a $20 from Taylor, which may have already broken) but having one is essential. Now that I'm using it I'm realizing how badly I was overcooking a lot of meat and sausage.
• I have something like this "safe" can opener, which cuts the can open from the side rather than the top. The idea is that you're only cutting through glue, and so the blade never touches food, which is a big hazard for contamination since people rarely clean their can openers thoroughly enough. So this is great in principle, but not all cans are equal, and sometimes it just totally fails to open some cans.
• Kitchenaid mixer. My mom got it for me for my birthday, and I have to say it's damn good, if you mix things a lot. Does a much better job than other mixers I've used. I also got the grinder attachment, which I've been experimenting with, so that gives the kitchenaid a bit more use.
• Slow cooker. Shouldn't be any surprise there why it's useful.
• Walmart's Tramontina stainless steel pans are about as good as All-Clad, but less than half the price. (Shocking! Quality stuff from Walmart?) I just got them so they haven't seen much use (see above comment about cast iron skillet) but I can already tell how nice they are compared to the bargain stuff I was using before.