Seafood is the perfect ingredient for quick and easy cooking. Fish, shrimps, prawns, clams, crabs, squid, and lobster take very little effort and time to cook, especially for simple seafood dishes. Just make sure that you start with the freshest seafood you can find so that the fantastic flavors of the sea will shine in your dish.

When buying fish, it should have clear and bright bulging eyes; shiny scales, skin or covering; firm flesh; red gills and clean smell. Other kinds of seafood should also have a clean smell because if it smells fishy or rotten, the catch is most likely a few days old and merely kept in the chiller.

To prepare the fish for cooking, scale, gut, clean and slice it according to the requirements of your recipe. Fillets are great for pan-frying while the whole fish itself would do well on the grill. The clams should be soaked in water for about 20 minutes to clean the sand out. Discard any open or broken clams. Scrub off with a firm brush any sand or barnacle stuck on the outer shell.

Quick and easy seafood recipes merely require steaming, poaching, baking and grilling the seafood. It must be taken out of the pan just as the flesh has become tender or bright orange (like shrimps, lobster, prawns and crabs). Overcooked seafood, like squid, tends to be rubbery.

In this collection of quick and easy seafood recipes, seafood is made into a nice, creamy crab chowder with corn and potatoes. The classic fish and chips, battered and deep-fried fish fillets served with crisp potatoes. Other quick and easy seafood recipes involve briefly cooking the seafood before serving it with a delightful sauce. Pan-fried fish with lemon-butter sauce as well as shrimp with cocktail sauce are foolproof and delicious.