Laylita's Recipes

When it came time for college, Layla Pujol had to make a major move. She would be leaving family and friends in her native Ecuador and heading to Austin, Texas to start college. Though barely an adult, Layla was now in an entirely new country, experiencing a new culture.

“I moved to the US and realized that one of the things that I missed the most—besides friends and family—was the food,” says Layla.

At that time in the early 2000s, it wasn’t as easy to find Ecuadorian or other South American cuisine at restaurants in the area. To get a taste of home, Layla would have to make the dishes herself—so she got on the phone and began calling friends’ moms to get their recipes.

“Oftentimes they wouldn’t give exact recipes,” says Layla. “They would say ‘Oh, you add a little bit of this ingredient, then a little bit of that ingredient.’ So I just started cooking and taking notes as I went. It was a process of trying things until I got the closest to what I remember the original dish tasting like.”

When Layla and her husband would have friends over to enjoy these dishes, they would inevitably ask her for the recipe. But after emailing out so many of these recipes, her husband finally asked her: Why not just start a blog with your recipes and direct your friends to that?

She loved the idea and started Laylita’s Recipes in 2006, balancing it with her full-time job in banking. Later, in 2008, when her kids were very young, she took some time off from work and was able to focus more on the blog. She began putting more recipes on the blog and taking detailed photos of the cooking process.

“But then my kids started preschool and I went back to work,” says Layla. “I was mostly ignoring the blog at that point. But then one day, a year later, my husband says ‘Hey, check it out—your blog is growing like crazy.’”

He was right. Layla’s recipes were resonating, particularly with Ecuadorians in the US who were hungry for authentic dishes from their home country. Now that she realized she had a hit on her hands, it was up to Layla to figure out a way to monetize her content, and turn this passion project into an actual business.

With a steady ad income, Layla has hired some contractors who help her with recipe development and translation. This makes it easier to complete the blog’s ultimate mission of helping people find authentic recipes from their native culture. For instance, she’s hired a writer in Brazil who helps translate recipes into Portuguese, as well as test Brazilian dishes.

She may need even more staff soon enough, because in the coming years Layla hopes to experiment with more video content. She believes this can help expand her audience and keep her content relevant to all sorts of readers.

“I think video will be important to integrate into the site because people want to see that you're not a robot, right?” says Layla. “They want to know there’s a human behind the content they’re enjoying.”

Forging that human connection with readers is one of the highlights of Layla’s job. One notable instance of connection occurred around 2010, when a reader invited Layla to dinner with his family.

“A family living in Seattle was having dinner with their daughter-in-law, who grew up in Argentina,” says Layla. “And they were making recipes from my blog. While I was hesitant to join them—after all, they were strangers—I decided to go, and it was a fantastic experience. They were a lovely family, and I actually kept in touch with the daughter-in-law, who’s become a friend.”

Moments like these remind Layla that food has a unique ability to bring people together across cultures, nations, and languages. In writing recipes for a global audience, Layla has found that countries that might seem different—like, say, the Dominican Republic and Ecuador—actually eat some of the same dishes, just by different names.

“We tend to focus on differences that we have between our country and other countries or different cultures,” says Layla. “But I’ve found that food really can be a powerful way for us to reach across cultures and find a common interest.”