Tonight we had boerenkoolstamppot for dinner. Don't you love those long Dutch words? I received the excellent advice to cook it with some bacon which worked out really well.

While traditionally paired with rookworst in Holland or kielbasa in countries where real rookworst is not available, tonight I served it bone-in pork chops with fresh mushrooms and thin slices of onion.

For the bacon I used North Country Smokehouse's cottage bacon that was cooked in a skillet for about 20 minutes. For the stamppot I used a recipe from a Dutch book and it called for onions. I found that a bit strange, since I don't remember that boerenkoolstamppot typically has onions in it. It worked well though: the onions made the dish more juicy and the result was delicious, especially combined with the crispy bacon.

For the Dutch readers: do you use onions in boerenkoolstamppot?

Boerenkoolstamppot.

Tonight's Democratic candidates debate was very heated. Possibly too heated for Ms. Clinton and Mr. Obama's good, but I thought it was very enjoyable and a good exchange of ideas. I don't think the debate changed the minds of a lot of voters, but Mr. Obama did take his chance to address some of the attacks by the Clinton campaign from last week.

It was interesting that the candidates thought that Mr. McCain is likely to be the Republican nominee. I still believe Mr. Romney will be their choice.

Today is Martin Luther King Day and I watched 15 minutes of his famous speech. As a blog put it: "it never gets old".

The program for this week: Thursday the Republican Debate on MSNBC, Saturday the Democratic primaries in South Carolina, and Sunday again a Democratic Debate, this time in Florida.

This afternoon I saw Cloverfield, a monster movie for which we saw previews this summer before Transformers.

The movie was entertaining and pretty convincing, as far as monster movies go. Cloverfield leaves you guessing about the background of the story and this is refreshing. At least the makers didn't try to squeeze lots of explanations in 90 minutes. I found the movie quite enjoyable with nice special effects.

A day of decisions... With his convincing win in Nevada, my prediction of Mr. Romney becoming the nominee for the Republicans is increasingly likely. It's time for Mr. Thompson to give up. He's always looked like he didn't really want to be President and today's results reflect that again. Mr. Giuliani didn't even try to participate in Nevada and stayed focussed in Florida. As a reporter on CNN put it: "he's going to Disneyland every day".

We got a little bit of snow today but we're warm inside. We've been watching TV all afternoon, the first results started coming in at 2.00 pm EST.

Ms. Clinton did quite well today, if not as well as predicted a month ago. The fight between Clinton and Obama will continue. There's another Democratic debate on Monday and next week's elections in South Carolina will be very interesting.

While he may have a relative good performance in South Carolina, today's result are again bad for Mr. Edwards. He probably won't give up until next Super Tuesday, but I don't believe he has a real chance for the nomination anymore.

Road salt in front of our office yesterday to prevent icing.