Welcome to Leadbelly, Vermont, where Gabby Fulbriten is hunting for the essential ingredients in a cluttered world. Gabby is a single parent raising three children next to a dump. She listens to Shakespeare on cassette, reads the personals, worries about her weight, and corresponds with Iggy, a religious fanatic, who might be the only available man left on Earth. Gabby makes recipes to make sense of life and love in a sometimes senseless world, a world of condominiums and hungry children. You'll find recipes like King Richard II Soup, Consumer Cry Croissants, and Sweet Vacation Pie for the traveling single parent. But most of all, you'll relate to Gabby's darkly funny musings on the state of the planet, or men: "Why do I feel so unsuited to the needs of the new man? I came from the era that learned how to make Indian curry soup and toast soybeans in the oven. I can decorate my man's VW bus or polyurethane the wood floors of his cabin in the woods.... Where are the men who long for love? Why do they seek an opponent now instead of a female?"