Create a snapshot of Mac that I can restore from What is the easiest way to create a snapshot of my Mac at its current state that I can use to do future re-installs from.  

I want to be able to get my Mac back to a state where all my required apps are set up with their required settings and plugins and all my system settings are set to a state I'm happy with.
You can indeed go into recovery mode and use Disk Utility to image your drive to another location (like an attached USB drive or the like.

There are also 3rd party programs (SuperDuper, Carbon Copy Cloner, and others) that will make a bootable image of your drive to either a DISK image (think multiple copies) or directly to another drive so that drive is bootable. The advantage of these is that they can do it on a live system without booting into recovery mode. The only downside is that you'll have to pay for them.