installing new SSD with no OS disks

[GGD]

Mr Downtown wrote:
A little more detail, please. I thought of using CCC to put Snow Leopard (and CCC?) on a big thumb drive . . . but what comes next? I'd have a Mini with an unformatted SSD in it and a thumb drive. How do I even get the Mini to boot up so I can run CCC again?

The "big thumb drive" you want to use is your NEW SSD. Put it into an external enclosure, initialize it (GUID partition map), and clone your internal drive to it. Then try booting from it to make sure it works OK, before swapping it into the Mini.