Bonjwing Lee quit his job as an attorney because he loved food too much.

Or at least that’s one way of looking at it, he said with a laugh.

The 33-year-old said he grew tired of making gobs of money in the corporate world, so he traded his law books for a cookbook one year ago.

Lee, a long-time food blogger, co-authored and took photos for “Bluestem: The Cookbook,” which was released in November. He was thrilled when his close friends Colby and Megan Garrelts, the co-owners of Bluestem restaurant in Westport, asked him to help pen it.

“It didn’t even seem like work because I got to play in a kitchen with two best friends,” he said. “And even though I’d never done anything like it before, I was surprised by how intuitive it was for me. I’ve read hundreds of cookbooks, so I knew how they work.”

Lee has an international cult following when it comes to writing about food. But fame has been bittersweet to the Kansas City native.

When Lee was in law school seven years ago, he started a food blog anonymously out of boredom. He said he was stunned when his blog, The Ulterior Epicure, took off, and people around the world started to become obsessed with him.

He received marriage proposals and offers to have his children. People incessantly followed him from restaurant to restaurant, ordering what he had ordered and emailing him their experiences. There was even a blog dedicated to discovering his identity, tracing his every move and compiling facts about his life.

“I’m just a guy with opinions, so it’s been incredibly weird and scary,” he said. “But it is what it is, because when you put yourself on the Internet, you just have to automatically know that part of your privacy goes with it.”

The success of his blog and the Bluestem cookbook has given Lee hope that he can turn his food journaling and photography into a full-time career.

Last year, he had a taste of what his future could be like. He spent almost every week of 2011 in a different country, blogging about his jet-setting adventures and sampling delicious, exotic cuisines.

Now, he said, he is receiving offers from chefs nationally and overseas to write cookbooks for them.

“My life has been pretty awesome,” he said. “Whose dream is it not to travel the world?”