Fish, venison, and Mexican dishes. My boyfriend got a small smoker last year, and I wanted to make kabobs with it. As far as I new, smoking foods took hours to do, so I prepares all the food, put it in the smoker and we went to a 2 hour movie. When we returned, the small chucks of steak were black and had the texture and toughness of jerky, and the vegetables crumbled in to ashes when we tried to touch them! I didn't realize that our tiny little smoker worked much quicker than the huge smokers used by farmers and butchers to cure large hams and such. This was a mistake I definitely learned from, and have no repeated since.