On November 1 I did not post my usual look at the months past and to come. A not insignificant part of the reason for this is that I was extremely busy and lost track of it. But it’s also true that I was feeling—and continue to feel—iffy about the traffic numbers reported by WordPress for my blog. At some point this summer my overall numbers spiked quite dramatically with a lot of traffic being reported from mainland China—which had historically not been a major source of traffic for my blog. Indeed, I’m not sure if prior to this summer mainland China had ever cracked the top 10 list of countries from which readers were coming to the blog. But for the last few months China has been #1, and that by an immense margin over the usual #1, the United States. I have no idea why this is or if this is something being noticed by all WordPress.com bloggers (I have not yet asked on the WordPress forums). But for November traffic from mainland China was almost 4x that from the United States—compare with August when traffic from the US was more than 30x that from mainland China. Do these numbers represent real traffic? I doubt it. And so I’m not going to bother telling you which the top posts in November were in terms of page-views. Let’s instead just look ahead to the last month of the year.

After a month of mezcal reviews in November (here, here, here and here), whisky will make a return to the blog this month. I’ll have a review of a young American malt whiskey and an old Scottish malt whisky; in between, I might have a review or two of Indian malts, if I see anything of interest while I’m in Delhi for two weeks. I’ll be eating out less than usual while in Delhi—as I’ll be there by myself and the point of the trip is to check on my parents—and it’s highly unlikely that any reports of those meals will make it to the blog in December. Hell, I still have three Delhi restaurant reports to go from July!. And speaking of July, I also have to finally get to my Kyoto reports. Those will start up this week and I should be done with them and my remaining reports from Delhi and New York (from October) before the year is out.

There will not be any more Twin Cities reports in December either. However, I will be posting some Twin Cities food content, starting this Wednesday with version 2.0 of my Twin Cities Fine Dining Rotation. There has been some movement on it from the first version from last year, so come back on Wednesday if you’re interested in that. Later in the month I’ll also have another Twin Cities restaurant list, covering a lot more (and not just fine dining) restaurants; and I’ll also have a year-end report on our eating out this year, covering the Twin Cities and all the other places we ate out in this year.

Oh yes, my cooking content continues to be posted on Instagram—most recently, I posted a video of the butter turkey (or turkey butter masala) that I made with leftover Thanksgiving turkey last week. Go check it out.