I have setup a Chef server in our network that I use to manage several nodes. These nodes have a chef-client installed executing as a daemon every X minutes.

The problem is that every time the client runs, it executes the recipes for all the cookbooks, even those previously executed, so it consumes resources and sometimes it even breaks thinks (with services restarts, for example).

I know that I can avoid executing a piece of code or a recipe I create as detailed here: Prevent chef recipe from executing previously executed action? but, would this mean that I should modify any cookbook that I download from the opscode repository.

In other words, is it possible to make the chef server (or the clients) to mark the cookbooks as 'executed' as soon as they are executed the first time?