Direwolf, Shadyslater and Tobinates all covered it. My first harvest tasted like all kinds of butthole. Smelled bad too. Had the hay smell you were talking about. So no super fast ghetto drying.
Now I'm certainly no master at curing but I'm going to give you a few pointers on what NOT to do that I learned from experience. By experience I mean I lost a jar full of nugs due to mold. Not a huge loss but I learned from it.
Since it's your first time I suggest you toss your nugs in cure jars in stages. Like lets say you chop your girls down and you're not quite sure if they're dry enough to start it. Go ahead and fill one jar one day and get it started. Then give the others a little more time. Maybe another day. Then toss those in jars as well. It's a better safe than sorry kinda thing. That's the reason I lost a jar. I wanted to have good tasting stuff but wasn't quite sure. Took the careful rout and it payed off. The rest of it turned out good.
Another thing to consider is that your popcorns are going to dry much quicker than your colas/tops. That's perfectly fine and the popcorn will regain moisture within an hour of being in the jars.
A trick I like to do for a more even dry as well is something I do with the colas/tops. Those big dense suckers will take a while to dry when they're all bunched up together. When you go to cut them you might notice they're still wet and sticky after you get in there. What I personally like to do is bend the stems on the nugs there so they're separated from each other. It allows more airflow to them. I see a lot of pics on here of giant dried clustered colas but it just makes me kind of nervous to do that myself.
Now on to smell. When you burp your jars you might want to do something to cover the smell. It WILL stink the room up and it'll do it QUICK. It'll quickly travel through the entire house. It's not so much of an issue when they get a lot dryer. But that first week it will. I burped a few jars of skunk#1 from RQ and my old roomie (who was behind my door, had a kitchen in between us and then his bedroom door) came out of his room 2 minutes later and was like "Dude it effin' reeks in here" "You smoking inside?"
So take smell into consideration.
You'll be glad you cured though. It makes for a much better taste.
Now if you want some quick smoke and decent taste then don't use jars for a bit of it. Grab yourself a good tupperware container and sort of cure a zip or so in there. It's not airtight but it will in fact spread moisture back into nugs. They'll taste better than strait up over dried nugs that weren't cured at all.
Well good luck in your venture and enjoy
Oh thanks guys, LOL . I missed it I guess. 
