My sister gave the girls in her ward that were graduating and entering RS, a cookbook with College Friendly Recipes in it and an apron. Each of her RS Presidents gave 3-4 recipes they thought would be easy and cheap for college. We printed them as photos so it was not expensive to print them, and then put them in a plastic photo book that we got from Wal-mart for $1.00, To fill the book we added some other pages with things like Cooking Helps, you can see them below.
This is not the cheapest gift in the world. I think the cost was about $4.00 each. But you could always just print out recipes on your computer in black and white and add them to the cook, you could make your own front or use one I have.
I have added blanks colorful pages, that you would just download and add text to.
Enjoy!