I have only tried to make catfish once in my lifetime. It did not turn out well at all so I've not been especially anxious to try it again. I have eaten some great catfish, mostly prepared in one of the southern states that I adore traveling through, however.

I will be choosing one of the following recipes to try my hand at making catfish once again. I have really been on a kick lately to try new recipes so I will buy the catfish fillets and hope for the best!

To prepare Spicy Catfish with Rice, begin by softening 1 cup of diced onion, 3 sticks of celery, 3 cloves of garlic, and 1 red, green, or yellow pepper that has been diced in a few tablespoons of oil. This will take about 5 minutes until the vegetables are starting to soften. Don't forget to stir them once in a while.

Add 1 cup of long grain rice and cover it with the oil in the pan. Stir in 2 cups of chicken broth (reduced fat or reduced sodium is fine), 1 teaspoon of hot sauce, and 1 tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce. Simmer for 5 minutes.

Cut 1 pound of cleaned catfish fillets into strips and put the strips into the pan with the rice. Cover the skillet and cook slowly until the fish is thoroughly cooked and the rice is finished. This will take at least 20 minutes, possibly as much as 30 until the fish is finished cooking. Just keep an eye on it to make sure the rice doesn't start sticking. If that happens, add more chicken broth a little at a time so that it doesn't stick. Serve with more hot sauce on the side if you dare! If not, tartar sauce will work great.

If you want to make Cheesy Catfish, start by heating the oven to 375 degrees. Clean 2 pounds of catfish fillets and then pat them dry.

In a bowl combine 1/2 cup of grated parmesan cheese with 1/4 cup of flour and the spices you wish to use. Pepper and paprika will be great, but if you want to add salt or you have another favorite spice for using with fish, go ahead and try it.

In another bowl, whisk 1 egg with a fork and add 1 tablespoon of milk to it. After you have mixed the egg and milk, dip the catfish pieces into the egg mixture and then the cheese mixture. Put the fillets into a baking dish and then pour 1/2 stick to 1 stick of melted butter over top of the fish fillets.

Bake for 25 to 35 minutes until the catfish is completely cooked.

Many kinds of batters work for catfish whether you use a bake or deep fry method. Batter that works for other fish will most likely be good, or you can look for a recipe for beer batter because that goes well with catfish.

So what do you serve with catfish? The sides that work best are the same things you would be served in a restaurant with fish. These include cole slaw, hush puppies, and golden fries.

I will never forget the worst grocery shopping blunder I ever made. Once every few months I stop by the fish and seafood counter and get some crab cakes. I buy the imitation crab meat cakes and when they are browned in extra virgin olive oil, they are every bit as delicious as those using the "real" crab meat.

The imitation crab cakes are generally medium in size and cost about $3.98 per pound. I commonly buy four of them at a time. That's pretty close to a pound and it's a great meal for less than five dollars.

I have this thing about shopping at new grocery stores so I found one in another town a few months ago and of course I had to go inside. The seafood counter was fabulous! The crab cakes were not $3.95, but $4.95 but they were larger than I usually buy and looked wonderful! So I decided to order six instead of four that time. $5 or $6 would be fine for such great looking crab cakes.

Enter the first problem. For some reason I still don't understand, I didn't watch the items going through the electronic price reader. I always monitor that with eagle eyes! But I didn't that day. The total seemed a bit high but that often happens at a new store when I find new and exciting products. I checked the sales slip after I got home all the same.

Bottom line is that my beautiful crab cakes were not $4.95 a pound, but $4.95 EACH and made with real crab meat. Anyone who has ever done such a thing will understand my horror when I saw that I had paid very nearly $30 for those crab cakes!

More recently my daughter wanted to buy quesadillas that were in a section that was marked with a price of $3.49. I saw when they went through the checkout that they came up on the monitor as $7.69. I don't know how prevalent this is, but I have learned that I need to watch even more closely when my order is being scanned.

One of my grocery stores (not the one where the quesadillas came from unfortunately!) gives the product free if it is scanned incorrectly. It is not only a good policy for the customers and prompts more people to watch the price scans as I do, but it is good for their workers, too, to make sure to code the products with the right prices to begin with. They will know who did the coding.

I got into this habit many years ago when I was still a kid. I remember my mother teaching me to watch prices by seeing her doing it. At that time the checkers had to punch everything into the computer or cash register by hand and it was very easy for "$27.00" to come up as a price instead of "$2.70" and mom always caught it.

"Excuse me, I think you may have added an extra zero to the price of that cereal, it came up as $27.00!" was almost a weekly occurrence back then. Now with the scanning I think a lot of people have become complacent about the matter and don't watch as often any longer. I have learned to remedy that and everyone should be aware of what they are actually paying for certain items that may be coded incorrectly.

Last year, I was invited to my first shrimp harvest. A friend of mine from college has a couple brothers that decided to farm shrimp, and set up a pond on their farm to do so. Apparently it is very easy and fun for them. I just had to go see for myself.

The shrimp harvest consisted of just that - the shrimp had been harvested from the pond and were being sold to friends and family. It was nice to be out on a farm and smell the fresh air. I have to admit though, this was my first farm experience that highlighted shrimp. There was a display at the shrimp harvest showing the whole process and how they were harvested. Technically, they were fresh water prawns.

The shrimp were not prepared in any way, just sold straight out of the pond. This means that they still had a head, legs, tentacles, guts and all. They were not very pretty. I noticed some had a lump of bright orange by their tail. My friend told me the bright orange was just eggs and you could scoop them out. I immediately had a flashback to the first time I tried sushi and asked what the pretty bright orange garnish was. I was not happy then when I was told shrimp eggs, and I was not happy now when I saw them on an actual real shrimp and knew that I had eaten them in the past. They looked much better on top of a cute little piece of sushi than they did in the abdomen of a freshly dead shrimp.

I asked my friend how to prepare the shrimp for cooking. She said to just pull back on the head and it will snap off. She said I could pull off the legs if I wanted to, and then just do whatever I would with shrimp you buy at the grocery store. It sounded pretty simple, so I bought some. I pictured a Saturday afternoon of cleaning shrimp, popping off their heads, and having my husband grill them. They were a good size, and they seemed perfect for grilling. I planned to do just that the next weekend. I just did not have the time, so we ended up having to freeze them. The next weekend I thought about cooking up the shrimp, but I saw the mass of frozen heads, beady eyes, tentacles and bright orange egg masses and just could not bring myself to do it. So, the shrimp sat in a freezer for quite a long time. I suggested to my husband once that he should clean them. He laughed at me. After a while, we decided that we would never cook them and we finally just threw them out.

I feel guilty for not wanting to clean the shrimp. After all, I could have tried something new and praised my friend and her brothers for their efforts. But, in the end I could not do it. I will just have to stick to grocery store shrimp. No shrimps with heads for me.

I am not, nor have I ever been a fan of fish. I adore seafood and sushi is almost as good as chocolate to me (note the word "almost!"), but plain fish I could take or leave. That's unfortunate considering it is a very healthy food and everyone should eat more of it.

Don't be afraid to experiment with different recipes for fish. The following recipes use haddock, but any fleshy white fish should work well. Add your own favorite herbs and spices. If it is a stuffed fish, feel free to use your own stuffing recipe instead of the one given in your cookbook or on a website. Experiment with different kinds of fish with the selection of recipes that you collect.

If it is a stuffed fish that you have chosen, there are various methods that will work. If you have flat fillets, just put the stuffing on top of one fillet and then cover with another. If you have long thin fillets, you may want to think about rolling them up with the stuffing in the center.

The easiest recipe I have found for fillets is to spread them with your favorite mayonnaise or salad dressing so that a mixture of grated parmesan cheese, pepper, and dry bread crumbs will stick to the fillets. Mix equal parts of the bread crumbs and parmesan cheese. About 1/4 cup of it will be enough for just a few pieces, or try 1/3 cup each for more servings.

Sprinkle the top with paprika or something like Emeril's Essence, fresh parsley, or whatever you'd like to sprinkle on the top. Then just bake it at 350 or 375 degrees (you may have something else in the oven at one of those heats) until it flakes, usually 30 to 40 minutes. I usually bread just the top of the fillet with the crumb mixture and then add a little water to the bottom of the baking dish so it doesn't stick.

To make Haddock with Spicy Tomato Sauce, start by softening 1/4 cup of diced onion or scallions, a cup of diced green pepper, and a clove of garlic in extra virgin olive oil. When it is soft, mix with a 15 ounce can of diced tomatoes and 1/4 cup of chili sauce, hot or mild. Add about a tablespoon of sugar and your desired amount of hot pepper sauce, liquid or ground, but be aware that a little goes a very long way as is true with any recipe using that ingredient. Also add any herbs you may enjoy with fish such as parsley or thyme.

Allow this tomato mix to simmer slowly for 15 minutes while stirring once in a while. If you want this to be a seafood sauce, add cooked shrimp or cooked small scallops at this point (about 1 to 2 cups). Keep simmering the sauce until the seafood is warmed through, about 5 more minutes.

Brush both sides of your haddock fillets with melted butter and place in a baking pan. Season the fillets to your liking and put a tablespoon or two of lemon juice over the fillets. Cover with the tomato sauce you made and bake in a preheated 400 degree oven until the fish is cooked. This should be about half an hour, but check it at 20 and 25 minutes.

If you are looking for a good seafood dinner, you will want to consider shrimp. This delicious seafood is versatile, though most people only boil or fry them. You can mix shrimp with any number of other ingredients for a wide array of meals. When you are selecting your shrimp, though, what do you need to know?

First, although shrimp come in pounds, you should think about how many shrimp you need. Some recipes, such as stuffed shrimp, work better with jumbo shrimp. With this size, you will get only about 25 of them per pound. With your average medium shrimp, you will get about 35-40 per pound, and these shrimp are great for any dish you wish to serve. Although you may have to scout them out, you also can get petite varieties. The very smallest come 160 to a pound, but the actual number varies widely. You can use these shrimp primarily for soups and salads.

Next, smell the shrimp. (You should go to a fresh market whenever possible.) Most people associated seafood with strong odors, but fresh shrimp should not have a smell. Some shrimp may have an iodine odor, but they are from deep waters, making the odor a sign of their living environment. They should have their natural color as well if they are fresh. Most shrimp sold in the United States comes in either the brown or white variety, depending on the time of year.

There are other issues you want to keep in mind when you are preparing shrimp. You will need to be able to clean and de-vein the shrimp. Some people simply use a small knife, but others believe in the shrimp shucking tools available in most seafood markets. These tools, which come in plastic or metal, basically sit behind the head of the shrimp and fit under the shell. You can give them a push, and they will pop off the head of the shrimp. De-veining is simple with this tool as well.

Shrimp are low in fat but high in cholesterol, making them neither all good nor all bad to eat. If you have cholesterol problems, you may want to consider cutting back on your shrimp intake. When you do get ready to eat shrimp, think about trying them in different ways. Most people boil them because it is easiest, and any good Southerner will fry up a batch.

Still, you should branch out and try sauteed, grilled, scampi, and many soups, salads, and casseroles that can be made with shrimp. They work well with pastas and many sauces, so give them a try there as well. The wonderful thing about cooking shrimp is that you don't have to cook them for long. They will get slightly pink in many recipes or very white if you boil them. Most of the time, this cooking takes only a few minutes before your shrimp are ready to eat. You can whip them up quickly and have a delicious meal. Don't limit yourself; shrimp are a versatile seafood.

By Julia Mercer