How do I create a boot disk?

This seems like it should be fairly simple - sort of a Mac 101 question, yet I've been searching and unable to find a simple way to do it. Here's my problem:
We are traveling for a year and I foolishly packed away all my CD's - including the Tiger install disk, somewhere deep in our storage unit which is now far, far away. I've already had to drop my laptop off at an Apple Store along the road to get the hard drive replaced on this trip, and they returned it to me with Panther installed, since that was the original OS when I bought it. Fortunately, I had good backups between CarbonCopy Cloner and Backup, and everything is as it was with Tiger, etc.
BUT, I would like to be able to have a backup of just the OS, for emergencies, and using diagnostic tools or doing repairs as needed. I realize I can use CCC to make a bootable disk image on one of my external drives, but I don't know how to just make it of the System for booting/repairs/reinstalling without including all 80 GB of what's on my hard disk... and my external drives are filling up with photos and backups, so that's why I'd like it on a CD or DVD if possible.
I've only used CCC a couple of times and it's fantastic, but I'm at a fairly rudimentary level in my understanding of creating disk images... Should I use CCC or Disk Utility, for example?
Also, I do NOT have Toast or the like, just the built-in software - can I still create a bootable CD/DVD?
Out here on the road my internet connection is spotty and bandwidth not always great, so I'd probably prefer not to download new programs, but if necessary, I could.
Thank you for your help, all you wonderful Mac folk!
Maggie

Okay, I checked out SuperDuper! and it looks great - I'm pretty sure I'm going to buy it (or at least download the free trial), but it still won't allow making a CD/DVD - it says on the website:
Please note that SuperDuper! is not designed to back up to CDs, DVDs or Tape, and needs a location (other than the boot volume) to store the backup - typically a volume on an internal or external (FireWire) drive.
Note also that USB drives do not allow booting Power PC based Macintoshes under any version of Mac OS X: this is not a SuperDuper! limitation, but one of the OS. If you would like to boot from a backup stored on an external drive, and have a Power PC based Mac, please purchase a Mac compatible FireWire drive.
So... I guess I could probably do the same with CarbonCopy Cloner, or get SuperDuper! and partition one of my firewire drives to have a section used for the bootable disk.
Another basic question - if my laptop won't startup for some reason, how would I boot from a firewire drive? I know how to start up from a CD in this situation (it just happened recently when my hard drive went bad - "horrible clicking noises" and all - I could boot from the TechTool Deluxe CD and confirm that yes, my hard drive was bad, but I couldn't access any files. Fortunately I had seen (or heard) the proverbial handwriting on the wall and backed up everything, so I was good, but I wanted a little more access than just one program's diagnostics.)
Anyway, thanks for the recommendation - I will check it out.
Maggie
Aluminum Powerbook G4   Mac OS X (10.4.9)  

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