Maggie Battista, by her own account, “generally comes from a place of yes.’’ She also comes from a place of artisanal foods, food gifts, handwriting, paper, twine, her online food shop Eatboutique.com, and the pop-up Eat Boutique markets she oversees each holiday season (the 2015 version, in Allston, just wrapped). But none of that would have come about if Battista didn’t make a habit of saying yes to whatever comes her way.

That explains why the bubbly Battista, who has a contagious smile, went ahead with this year’s holiday market, despite the fact that she was coming off a 10-city tour promoting her first book, “Food Gift Love,’’ which offers more than 100 recipes for gifts of food and a wealth of tips for packaging them. It grew out of the online market, which in turn grew out of Battista’s blog, and the blog grew out of a simple desire to put her thoughts in writing.

After studying journalism at Boston University, she explains, “I had wonderful plans to write, but instead, I fell into the Internet. It was a wonderful time — about 20 years ago — and I spent the better part of my life working for startups, in user experience and social media, before social media was social media.’’ Heady days, she says. “I felt like I wasn’t doing what I had really intended to do. In 2007, I started a blog, saying, ‘Let me just write and see where it goes.’ ’’

Battista, 42, lives in Lynnfield with her husband, Don Cosseboom, who is senior product manager at Pixability, an ad-buying and video-marketing platform for YouTube. “Domestic arts in general,’’ and food gifts in particular, had long been interests of hers. She grew up in a food-loving household, with an Italian-American father and a Honduran mother. “Food was the great connector,’’ she says. “We’d have things like refried beans with mozzarella cheese — a weird mish-mash, but it was how we connected and spent time together.’’ Battista became an avid home cook and a dedicated traveler; she enjoyed finding artisanal food producers in her travels and amassed a collection of 600 cookbooks.

As she shifted from tech to food, Battista worked briefly at Oleana in Cambridge. Today the restaurant’s chef and owner, Ana Sortun, is a fan of the new author. “She’s really pushed it forward and pioneered,’’ says Sortun. “She supports some really great stuff. She went out on a limb and took a chance, and it’s pretty exciting.’’

Battista also began collecting items like butcher twine, newspaper food sections, and masking tape. “I had no idea what it was all for,’’ she says. “Until suddenly my closet was too full. My husband looked at it and said, ‘What are you doing?’ ’’

What she was doing, it turned out, was honing an approach and a DIY aesthetic perfectly in tune with the times. When, after two years of blogging, she decided to try her hand at food gifts, she used those stored-up newspapers and pieces of string and tape to create a look that’s at once homemade and refined. Battista’s hope for her book and its confections, baked goods, preserves, liqueurs, and such, is that it reflects the “easy, effortless, organic nature’’ of the best, and least fussy, food gifts. “I wanted the book to feel like anyone could do it,’’ she says.

She demurs at the suggestion that she might be the anti–Martha Stewart. “[Stewart] doesn’t come up and shouldn’t come up’’ in comparison, Battista says, though she admits “we all aspire to be a little like her. I want things to be beautiful, but I also strive to make them down-to-earth and accessible.’’

To that end, she insists that some gifts are practically instant to make. “It can take no time at all — something you can do in five minutes before breakfast,’’ she says. At the Eat Boutique Holiday Market in early December in Allston, Battista hosted a demonstration of five-minute gifts, whipping together vanilla sea salt and homemade grenadine syrup in a blink of an eye. “This is the simplest and easiest thing ever,’’ she tells the crowds, scraping seeds from a plump vanilla bean and pounding them in a mortar with sea salt. She spoons the mixture into a sweet canning jar (French jar-maker Le Parfait sponsored Battista’s book tour, and its products are prominently displayed at the market), ties it with a linen ribbon, adds a hand-written tag, and voila! — there’s a nice little something for a teacher, a neighbor, or another suitable recipient. One woman whispers to her companion, “I actually could do that.’’

The trick, says Battista, is not to try too hard (or at least, to appear not to have tried too hard). Wrapping the linen ribbon round the jar, she says, “You can make a bow, but I’m more of a knot fan. There’s no need to make a perfect bow.’’ Effortless elegance is the sweet spot Battista has hit in her book and on her site. To be sure, some recipes take a good deal more time than five minutes. Jam-swirled marshmallows and grapefruit-elderflower marmalade require some skill and part of an afternoon, but the DIY expert has the natural’s knack of making it all look doable.

Someone asks Battista which recipe in her book is the most popular. On her tour, says Battista, the audience was more interested in her childhood, her own history, and her path from blogger to entrepreneur and author. Her personal favorite recipe, she says, is rompopo, a Latin-style eggnog from her mother.

As a die-hard food-gifter, Battista believes that gifts such as smoky candied popcorn or preserved lemons should not be restricted to special occasions. She says, “It’s not just a holiday activity. People don’t think that taking a dish to a potluck is a gift, but it is. You still want to make sure it’s beautifully presented.’’

And, as she shakes her jar of grenadine at the demo, she delivers the words all gift-makers long to hear: “I think food gifts should be easy.’’

Jane Dornbusch can be reached at jdornbusch@verizon.net.