Hello! And welcome.

My name is Aimée Wimbush-Bourque, and I’m the chief cook and writer around here.

I do the cooking for our close-knit family of five: my husband Danny,  our two sons, Noah and Mateo, and Clara, now 11 years old.

Bourque family canning party | Simple Bites

 All photos by Tim Chin

Prior to moving to Halifax, we spent nine years living on our semi-urban homestead just outside of Montréal, Canada. There we put in a beautiful raised bed garden, raised a brood of chickens, and wrote a few cookbooks, too.

Now we’ve recently located to a little lakeside cottage just outside of Halifax, Nova Scotia, following our dream of living near the sea. It’s much more than that, of course. For a long time we’ve had a desire for a lifestyle change, a slower pace of life – and no one does slow like the Maritimes.

So we found ourselves a new home for the holidays and moved in late 2018.

A ‘real food’ upbringing

Cooking has always been my preferred recreational activity, creative outlet, and source of relaxation. My biggest inspiration is my mother, who was about 30 years ahead of the recent “real food” movement. She and my father homeschooled us four kids and raised most of our own food, which gave me ample ‘Little House on the Prairie’ opportunities as a little girl. Milking goats, collecting eggs, hauling wood, and baking bread were just a few of my daily activities.

That rural upbringing on Canada’s West Coast instilled a permanent connection to nature and the simple things in life like camping trips, mushroom foraging and pulling carrots from the kitchen garden.

At age 20 I ate my way around the world, was bitten by the travel bug and have now visited a total of eighteen countries on four continents. My heart then led me to Quebec, which I now call home, to follow a certain bright-eyed engineering student, to whom I am now happily married.

From Restaurants to RSS

Before the kids arrived, I went to culinary school, which led to several years of cooking in fine-dining establishments, and lastly, I dabbled in catering and some personal chef work.

After falling in love with motherhood and wanting to stay at home with my babies, and after nearly ten years in the professional cooking industry, I traded my tongs and chef whites for cloth diapers and a laptop, and married my two passions by becoming a food/mommy blogger.

Aimee and Clara picking raspberries

Not surprisingly, I’m much busier as a home manager and blogger than I ever was in the fine-dining industry – and happier, too! I’m a big advocate of kids in the kitchen and encourage my crew to be creative and have fun with food.

Clara in the garden | Simple Bites

Life today

I could never cook without good quality spices, olive oil and sea salt, I could never function without dark roast coffee or homemade cookies, and I don’t take for granted how fortunate I am to be able to cook and write for a living – all out of the comforts of my own home.

For that I thank YOU, the reader. I feel honoured and humbled daily that each one of you take the times to visit my little corner.

Want to contact me? Head here. I wish I had more time to write you back, but please know I read every email that comes my way.

I love showcasing my kitchen projects on Instagram, where you can catch day-today life in Stories. And at @AimeeofNS you can get a peak into our new Nova Scotia adventures.

Feel free to follow me on Twitter (now just “X”), ‘Like’ this blog on Facebook, or browse my gazillion Pinterest boards for inspiration on everything from winter salads to home preserves.

I wrote a cookbook! Brown Eggs and Jam Jars is a celebration of the seasons and the joyous events they bring. My latest book is The Simple Bites Kitchen, which took home Silver at the 2018 Taste Canada Awards.

Want to tour my kitchen? Read an exclusive interview on blogging, motherhood and food with Saveur magazine? Read What a Day of Summer Preserving Looks Like for My Family? Tour our urban homestead?

Care to tour the homestead through the eye of The Kitchn or catch my conversations with my friends at World Vision? Oh, and here’s an interview with Best Health Magazine.

Thanks for stopping by.

~ Aimée