Book takes mystery out of cooking fish

If you rarely cook fish because it doesn't come out great, a new comprehensive seafood volume, "Fish Without a Doubt," by Rick Moonen & Roy Finamore (Houghton Mifflin; $35), might help.

It includes more than 250 recipes using poaching, steaming, grilling, baking, roasting, sauteing and frying. Particularly informative are the photos detailing cleaning, filleting and skinning different kinds of fish along with shelling, deveining and butterflying shrimp, cleaning soft-shell crabs, prepping scallops, cleaning squid and mussels, shucking clams and oysters, and preparing a lobster for cooking.

Moonen, chef-owner of RM Seafood in Las Vegas, and Finamore, a cookbook author, give lots of tips and include other options in the recipes so you can use what's freshest in markets. Also useful are shopping and storage notes, as well as the discussion about that "fishy" smell in the kitchen. *