Guus Bosman

Ah, another great night for political junkies -- the Super Tuesday results.

I had a meeting until 8.30 pm today but I received the first projections on my cell phone. During the evening we watched the results coming in. I had to look up the locations of some of the states (Idaho, Missouri) and it was interesting to see the differences between various parts of the countries.

Lots of states were still being counted as of midnight, but it looks like Ms. Clinton and Mr. Obama are going head to head, with a slight edge for Clinton. Pretty amazing, compared to the polls only two months ago when Clinton was ahead it every state on the ballot this week. The contest on the Democratic side will go on for many more weeks, something that I believe is in Obama's favor.

The results on the Republic side were quite interesting. My prediction that Mr. Romney would win the nomination looks pretty shaky right now as became clear in the last week. Mr. Huckabee is doing surprisingly well -- better than Romney even. The only thing that caused the crowd to loudly cheer in Mitt Romney's headquarters was when he said: "...and we're going to end illegal immigration". Neither McCains nor Clinton's speeches were very inspiring but all candidates must be extremely tired by now. At the same time: Mr. Obama's speech was again very well delivered -- what a gifted speaker.

This afternoon there are two major TV events, and I'm watching neither. In the US there's the Superbowl, and in Holland there's a special report on the Holloway case where a reporter claims to have solved the case of her disappearance in Aruba.

After a nice, long run this morning I'm getting ready for baking the Italian dish, with a beer and the Democratic debate in the background.

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?

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.