About five years ago, two of my good friends got married within a few months of each other. I was still pretty fresh out of college back then and working hard at my first real job. As is true with most first real job, this one paid peanuts and so I wasn't able to afford much in the way of gifts for them.

Instead of splurging on items from their registries that I couldn't afford, I bought two plain, spiral-bound notebooks and decoupage the covers with pictures of food cut from magazines. I pasted in tabs about every 35 pages or so to divide up sections between Main Dishes, Sides, Soups, Salads and Desserts (there may have also been a Miscellanous section). At the beginning of each section I wrote in two or three recipes I particularly liked, leaving plenty of space for them to add in their own recipes over the years.

This gift doesn't work for more of the devoted cooks who tend to amass binders full of recipes (like me), but for the folks who like to have a stash of tried and true recipes easily available to them, this is a good way to go. I know my friend Jamie still uses hers frequently, as when I went over to her house last summer, she greeted me at the door with the words, "I made your mayo-free potato salad yesterday. It was so good!" If you're looking for ideas for holiday gifts you can make, this might be one to tuck into your bag of tricks.

If you want to create a cookbook that requires a little less work that a hand decoupaged and written one, check out the new feature at Epicurious. They've partnered with Tastebook to give you an easy way to drag and drop recipes from your Epicurious account straight into a book template. A personal cookbook with up to 100 recipes can be had for $34.95.