Welcome to the essential companion for cooking and making epic Quality Meats, whether you are a beginner, expert or somewhere in between. From easy recipes for grilling and roasting your favourite cuts, to sandwiches and small plates, to more ambitious undertakings like making bacon, briskets, sausages and charcuterie, or smoking your own meats, acclaimed chef Luke Powell has you covered.

Luke worked in top-level kitchens for decades before pursuing his passion for charcuterie and is now founder and co-owner of hatted restaurant turned smallgoods wholesaler LP's Quality Meats, and Bella Brutta Pizza, both in inner Sydney. He has a chef's sense for flavour and has honed the art of charcuterie at home over multiple decades.

This fully photographed, wibalin-textured hardback has over 80 recipes with step-by-step photography and includes special features on salami and brisket.

While travelling overland to India from Europe in the fall of 1971, Luke Powell ran into the war between India and Pakistan, and he spent the following winter in neighbouring Afghanistan. Powell was stunned by the beauty of the country, the state of preservation of the culture, and by the Afghans' ability to be totally self-sustaining. He returned nearly every year until 1978, when he left the country three days before a Communist coup. Powell's ability to transform raw 35 mm film into refined printed images grew during 15 years when he printed his work with the legendary Dye Transfer Process. The Afghan Folio exhibition travelled to over 120 museums and galleries in North America and Europe, during the years when the Russians were occupying Kabul. In early 2000 the Taliban government invited Luke Powell to come back to Afghanistan, and later that year the Northern Alliance allowed him to travel alone in areas under their control. Through 2003 Powell took photographs for the United Nations Demining Program for Afghanistan and other UN agencies. In Afghan Gold Luke Powell has tried to separate art from journalism and show only the beautiful, traditional side of Afghanistan. In the text, published in a separate volume, Powell acts as a spokesman for an essentially peace-loving people who have been at war for the last three decades, placing the images in an unusually broad historical context.

Today the nation of Afghanistan is synonymous with chaos, violence, war and poverty, yet it wasn't always that way. Just prior to the Soviet invasion and all the resultant wars that have followed, Afghanistan was a sleepy backwater content in its own simplicity. This book is a photo essay of what Afghanistan was like just before the era of endless wars. Photos from the 1970s illustrate the history of this land before it was broken by the competion of many outside forces.