I've read the documentation on Chef twice over. I still can't wrap my head around it's concept because they skip but fundamentals and jump to complex deployments with chef-server.

Using chef-solo and possibly knife, is there a simple way to provision a server and deploy?

I may be wrong, but it seems like with my cookbooks prepped, this should be very simple.

knife rackspace server create --flavor 1 --image 112

That provisions my server. I can optionally pass --run-list "recipe[mything]", but how do my cookbooks in ~/my_cookbooks actually get on the server? Do I have to manually transfer them? That seems counterproductive.