Nutritionists recommend eating a wide variety of brightly colored foods. The more vivid the color of the fruits and vegetables, they say, the more nutrients it contains.

Using colorful cookware doesn’t add any nutrients, but the colorful silicone kitchen cookware now available does add some cheer to the kitchen.

Silicone cookware and kitchen tools made their first appearances a few years ago and have been popular with cooks for several reasons besides their bright colors.

Silicone disperses heat slowly and

evenly, an advantage for many baked goods and cooks without “hot spots.”

The flexible, bendable nature of silicone also makes it a favorite among many bakers, because just twisting it slightly releases muffins, cupcakes and loaves easily.

This Gumby-like quality adds to its appeal for those who are short on storage space. Silicone pans, colanders and other bulky items can be folded or rolled up for more compact storage.

For items that don’t get used frequently, silicone makes sense. While I would be reluctant to devote a cubic foot of kitchen storage space to a tagine used just a few times a year for cooking North African dishes, my bright orange silicone tagine folds flat and takes up less space than a cereal bowl in between its too-infrequent uses.

For oven use, it’s important to find items made from high quality, food-grade silicone. The easiest way to determine if the silicone is high-quality is to bend the item sharply; if a white line appears, fillers and extenders have been added to the Silicone strainer, which can compromise the heat conduction and non-stick properties of the pan.

While silicone has found its way into many ovens, it’s even more prevalent in the kitchen gadget drawer. One of the most popular silicone gadgets is the spatula; since silicone can withstand temperatures above 550 degrees, silicone spatulas are perfect for stirring thick sauces as they boil.

That heat tolerance also makes silicone utensils easy to clean because they can stand up to a hot dishwasher. Basting brushes with silicone bristles are a big improvement over other pastry brushes for this reason, especially for applying a thick, sticky glaze like balsamic-honey glaze for salmon.

Amid all the bright-colored spatulas, trivets, grips, whisks and other implements, one silicone gadget reigns supreme. Until silicone kitchenware came along, peeling garlic was a hands-on job. The unassuming garlic peeler is a small silicone tube that resembles a manicotti shell. Cloves of garlic go in, and after a quick roll on the counter, they emerge without their papery peel.

That might seem like a trivial time-saver, but when the recipe in question is one like Shrimp Florentine with Caramelized Garlic, which calls for 20 cloves of garlic, a $4 silicone roll seems like a great investment.

Few cooks need the full battery of silicone gadgets available. Some of them, such as the cake pan bands touted by Rose Levy Beranbaum, author of the “The Cake Bible,” seem too esoteric to warrant even the minimal drawer space they would claim.

Every cook should find some joy in the kitchen, though, and if a rainbow-looped whisk or a hot-pink spatula bring some fun to cooking tasks, they’re a great addition to the kitchen.