Pam Reiss

Pam Reiss lives in Winnipeg where she works in the family business, Desserts Plus, a kosher catering company and specialty food store.  Other than the three years she spent away at the University of Minnesota, this prairie city has always been her home.

Pam earned a bachelor degree in Hotel, Restaurant and Institutional Management, but she comes by her love of the food business naturally.  When she was in grade school, her parents opened Desserts Plus as a catering company and restaurant. Throughout her childhood, Pam spent afternoons and weekends washing dishes and peeling potatoes.  Helping at weddings and serving in the family restaurant were next.  Finally, she started working on food prep and was soon experimenting and testing new recipes for the restaurant.

After returning from university, Pam was instrumental in moving Desserts Plus to a new location, on the south side of Winnipeg and with the rest of the family took the business in a new direction. The company has expanded to include a specialty food store, specializing in kosher and Israeli products and is now the only independent kosher food store in the city, with customers throughout the prairie provinces.

Pam always enjoyed spending time in the kitchen testing and trying out new recipes and it wasn’t long before she combined her interest in creating recipes with her love of writing to create Soup – A Kosher Collection, her first cookbook which was nominated for a Cuisine Canada Cookbook Award.  After the publication of Soup, Pam wrote recipe columns for a number of years and her recipes have appeared in the Jerusalem Post, Los Angeles Jewish Journal, the Jewish Independent, Jewish Post and News and several other newspapers throughout North America.

A few years ago, Pam put her recipe columns on hold to begin testing recipes for her second cookbook, Passover – A Kosher Collection.  That book, a mixture of traditional and contemporary recipes, was published in January 2010 to great reviews.

When not working on cookbooks, her work at Desserts Plus keeps Pam busy and involved in the food world.  When possible, Pam spends her downtime traveling and has been to the Middles East, Australia, China, Europe and all over North America.  She’s been able to pick up interesting recipe ideas through her travels.