Rettigs/refactor

This refactor almost completely rewrites the cookbook, adding lots of new features as well as bugfixes and improvements over the current version.  I just finished doing some basic testing on it and it seems like it should be good enough to use in production, but I'd like to look at this with someone before pushing it just to make sure I didn't leave anything out or overlook anything serious.
What exactly is the purpose of the last 3 lines?  What does ||= do?

I'm assuming the block just sets 'user' if it's nil?  If so, there are other ways to do that, so why this way?