Paula Kigitovica: Keeping Vegan Food Colorful and Bright

Paula says her love of cooking goes back as far as she can remember. In her family home in Riga, her mother and grandmother were always cooking, making bread from scratch and baking cakes, and Paula spent much of her childhood watching them work. She always loved food and the meals the family shared at home.

The dish she returns to most in memory is her mother's homemade bread. She describes it as the only bread she truly loves and the one she will always think about. She makes it herself now, even though it takes most of a day, and she still counts it among the best things there is.

She has also noticed that the same bread never tastes quite the same from one city to the next. In her view, the water, the air, and many other small factors all shape how a loaf turns out.

Like many people, Paula found that cooking slipped away once she started working. A busy schedule meant eating out more than cooking at home, and she says she stopped thinking about her passion at all while her focus was on her job.

A few years ago, she began focusing more on herself and on figuring out what she really loved. That search led her back to her childhood memories of cooking and watching her mother in the kitchen. She had never stopped cooking entirely, but about three years ago she recorded a video of a dish for the first time, and she knew right away that she wanted to keep going.

From that day she started filming every single day. Once she had a handful of videos ready, she opened her Instagram page, and cooking on camera has been part of her routine ever since.

Alongside her cooking, Paula has worked as a fashion model for more than 10 years, and modeling remains her main job. Her recipe page is entirely her own work. She handles the cooking, recipe development, content creation, filming, editing, and posting herself, without help from anyone. When people ask how she fits it all in, her answer is straightforward.

"When you follow your passion, you always find time for it."

She cooks and films in the evenings, in the mornings, on weekends, and on days off. She also points out that everyone has to eat, so whenever she makes a meal, including meals for friends, she records the recipe as she goes.

Her process starts with an idea for a dish. She buys the ingredients, then cuts, cleans, and prepares everything before she begins cooking, so that when she is filming, she does not lose time or make mistakes partway through. Once the dish is done, she cleans up, which she calls the hardest part of the whole process. Not every recipe goes to plan, and baking is where things most often go wrong for her, with baked goods that have come out burned or underbaked.

Paula's page is fully vegan. She says vegan cuisine fascinates her, and what she loves most about it is how diverse it can be. Within that, sweets are where her heart is. She has always loved cakes and desserts, a fondness she traces back to her family, who love sweets and have always made them together. There is a practical side to it too.

"I think that sweets somehow look much better on the camera."

Paula does not spend much time measuring herself against other creators. In her view, every profession is full of people doing similar work, and the answer is to follow your heart and your own path, because comparing yourself to others or copying their ideas makes the work stop feeling like your own. What she wants her page to stand for is color, and she keeps her recipes bright on purpose.

"I feel like eating colorful recipes are much more fun and creative than just bland food without any colors."

She keeps her captions simple to follow and is confident that some of her recipes are easy enough for people with very little cooking experience.

Paula is originally from Riga, Latvia, and has lived in Italy for the past seven years. By now, she says, she is more adapted to Italian cuisine than anything else.

Around her, the classics still hold their place: pizza, pasta, and tiramisu. But she sees Milan as a big city that is always changing, in food as much as in fashion. Right now, she says, matcha is everywhere, with so many new matcha and brunch spots opening that it has become the most popular food topic in town.

Italy has also given her the one dish she says she could eat for the rest of her life: real Italian gelato. She would happily have it for breakfast, lunch, or dinner, at any time of day.

Paula says the early days felt easy because the page was just a hobby. Once she began thinking about its future and about turning it into a business, the challenges became much more visible.

Reach is one of them. She has found that many factors affect how many views a video gets, and the results are hard to predict. She says you can sometimes post five reels of the same recipe and find that only the fifth gets a lot of views, which brings confusion and some insecurity with it. She has also been through periods of burnout, when she did not feel like cooking or even want to see her kitchen, and staying consistent around a work schedule is hard work in itself.

More recently, she feels growing has become harder for another reason. In her experience, the rise of AI-generated recipes has flooded feeds with content, and she has noticed less reach, fewer views, and fewer new followers, which she attributes to that overflow. At times, she says, it is hard to even tell the difference. Still, she believes that as long as you love what you do, the challenges tend to clear themselves.

Through all of it, Paula hears from her followers every day. Some ask how to make a recipe a different way or whether they can swap one ingredient for another, and others simply send her messages. She tries to respond to everyone, because engaging with the people who follow her is one of the things she considers most important.

"That's what makes my blog feel alive."

Asked what inspires her, Paula answers with how she approaches life in general. She believes life is beautiful, that every person has their own path, and that it matters to appreciate what you already have.

"I wake up with a smile just because I know it's a new day and it's full of possibilities."

Finding her passion is part of that. She sees how easy it is for people to go to work unhappy and stay stuck in a routine. Once you find what you love, she says, it brings a kind of inspiration that makes you want to create and keep moving forward.

That drive has already produced her own ebook, along with a landing page for it. She loves creating, drawing, and designing presentations, so choosing the recipes, settling on a theme, and putting each page together felt creative from start to finish, and she says she learned a great deal from the work.

For now, she is going with the flow, but her longer-term goal is clear: she wants her blog to become her full-time job. She is slowly developing some ideas toward that, which she is keeping to herself for the moment. Her next step, she says, is building a proper recipe blog, a professional home for her recipes that also helps them appear on Google.

Paula's message to readers is for everyone, including people who do not cook. She hopes they will set aside time for cooking, even one day per week, because she finds it so relaxing.

In her view, even people who have never cooked before have something to gain from it, and it is a way to simply have fun.

"By sparing just a few hours of getting together with their loved one or with anyone else, it's really a way to reconnect."

From her mother's bread in Riga to her kitchen in Milan, Paula's cooking has always come back to family, color, and making time for what she loves. She builds every recipe, video, and caption herself around a modeling career, answers the people who write to her, and keeps working toward the day her blog becomes her full-time job.

Follow Paula's colorful vegan recipes on Instagram at @thedreamyvegan. Chefadora spotlights creators like Paula because stories of food carried from one home to another, from Riga to Milan and into kitchens around the world, sit at the heart of our mission to bridge cultures through food.

Updated on 01 Oct 2026