When we hunted down a deer with a friend, prepared Fireplace kit, added wood, ignited fire and added deer steaks in it, they normaly started to get cooked but never swap to "cooked" state. We waited for at least 15minutes, but nothing happened.
But when he logged off, meat was magically cooked in a few seconds. It also worked when he waited by the fire and I ran far away from that place, aprox. 500m. Before that we had no chance to cook it succesfully.