Six years ago, Aimee Wimbush-Bourque of Laval, Que., gave up her job as a professional chef to become a stay-at-home mom to her newborn son, Noah. Three years later, a second son, Mateo, came along. Wimbush-Bourque explored her passion for food by cooking up gourmet dinners for her husband, Danny, and the kids. “The ironic thing was that the boys were picky eaters,” recalls Wimbush-Bourque, who’s now 33 and expecting a baby girl in March. “They hated almost everything I made.” So she channelled her bemused frustration into a blog she called Under the High Chair.

It featured a lovely line drawing, done by a friend, of two chubby legs in a high chair with an array of food from chicken to croissants strewn underneath. Wimbush-Bourque stocked the blog with recipes and photos of the food she made for her family, from chocolate banana pancakes to meatballs, along with observations about the general havoc of the family dinner table.

Wimbush-Bourque’s boys may not have been impressed with her scratch cooking, but her readers certainly were. Within her first year of blogging, she had 4,000 hits a month to her site. What’s more, she managed to attract the interest of fellow blogger Tsh Oxen­reider, based in Oregon, whose website Simple Mom has more than 35,000 subscribers and was nominated for a Bloggie (the industry’s version of an Oscar). Oxenreider wanted to extend her brand by adding a dedicated food blog called Simple Bites. And she wanted Wimbush-Bourque to write it.

The two went live with Simplebites.net in 2010, and they now boast 11,000 subscribers and 325,000 to 350,000 page views per month. Wimbush-Bourque won’t release concrete earnings figures, but says the part-time venture earns her “a respectable part-time income” through advertising. And that’s just the beginning. She recently caught the attention of a New York agent and is in the process of putting together a cookbook proposal for a publisher. The funny thing, she says, is that “I love blogging. I would do it anyway. I really, really would.”