FYI - setting default values when using the chef generate command

You don’t have to make your own “code generator” cookbook to use ‘chef generate…’ if you simply care about setting defaults a-la cookbook_email in knife.rb

See: https://github.com/chef/chef-dk/issues/792#issuecomment-209082235

Requires Chef-DK 0.12+

Shout out to @sdmacfarlane who provided the info.