Katy,
I did most of my serious cooking on my days off - looked forward to it. Being single for a long time it was fun to cook, I'd parcel up the leftovers into microwave lunch sized containers and take those to work for dinner. I didn't have to come home from work and cook for a big group (well I did for a while). Working and cooking, or being a housewife and cooking too is rough work. I can see why a lot of people like reading my stuff but don't have the time or energy to do it.
The cazuela recipe is something that takes about 3 hours or so. In 1999 I lived in Chile for about a year, so I was served this dish and made it a lot. A lot of folks in Chile have maids or "nannys" that work part of the day, doing laundry, cleaning the house and usually making something for dinner. Labor is stupid cheap there (20 percent of the population has 80 percent of the money and the other 80 percent of the population work any way they can, the maid we had charged us 5000 pesos a visit, or $10.00 !!). We'd have her come like 3 days a week. They'd put the cazuela on about noon. It's a boiled dinner - using chicken for it signified more of a special occasion, more often some of stew meat bones was pretty normal fare.
I've seen you posting a lot of stuff lately, I apologize for not chiming in on those threads - I was out of circulation since Thursday, got really sick (thought I'd had a heart attack), spent all of Saturday in the hospital and haven't been online much at all since Thursday. Glad as heck to be around and getting back into the rotation (so to speak).
