The long cooking time has to do with it being a meal prepared in a crockpot. Crockpots are slow cookers designed so that you can put your food in it to cook, leave for work, and come home to a cooked, hot, meal, ready to go. Crockpots don't get really, really, hot. They get hot enough to slowly cook. It is one of the easiest ways to get cheap, tough, meat to be tender.
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Slow cooker or otherwise known as a crockpot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crockpot)