Today was of the foggiest days I’ve seen in years. Not enough to make driving impossible, but enough to erase detail in the mid-distance and everything further away. At least it wasn’t cold. They say cold air is massing in the Dakotas and Minnesota for an assault on us soon.

On the menu tonight: shark steak and fruitcake, among other things. Some months ago, I bought the shark at Valli, a fine store I trust not to sell me too much extra mercury with my shark, and it’s been frozen since then. Recently I decided it was about time to eat it, so I thawed it and faced the task of cooking it. But how?

I could have looked it up. In the Joy of Cooking, maybe. Or on YouTube, where a half-dozen Cook Your Shark videos probably await. But no. I wanted to go without expert advice. So I salted the meat a little, heated a bit of olive oil, and cooked it slowly in that. Simple, but effective. It was good.

No one else wanted any. We had other fish on the table, and everyone else ate that. I finally persuaded Lilly to take a bite and she said she liked it, but didn’t eat any more. Maybe I shouldn’t have used that loaded word “shark.” But it isn’t loaded for me. I remember buying shark at a grocery store in California more than 30 years ago, and I’ve eaten it sporadically ever since.

As for the fruitcake, which was my dessert, our Collin Street Bakery fruitcake had arrived over the long weekend. Sometimes around Christmas we buy one, sometimes not.

Not sure why people joke about fruitcakes, but maybe we can blame that on the otherwise admirable Johnny Carson. A bad fruitcake is a bad thing – like anything else – but a good fruitcake is really good. Collin Street fruitcakes, made in Corsicana, Texas, and shipped all over the world, are really good.