Bare minimal Chef provisioning and deployment?

If you use chef-solo, you don't get to use knife. Knife is API client for the chef-server, with some extra utility sugar (like knife rackspace server create you've mentioned).

To configure server with chef-solo, you should copy your chef repo to the server, and run chef-solo there over ssh. There is no ready-made script or knife plugin that I know of that would do it automatically.

Command knife rackspace server create creates new Rackspace server, and then initializes it for chef-server that knife knows of by calling knife bootstrap. It won't work with chef-solo easily.

Technically, knife bootstrap, and thus knife rackspace server create, can be coerced to work with chef-solo by writing a custom bootstrap template that, instead of initializing chef-client, would download your chef repository and run chef-solo - see knife bootstrap --help, its wiki page, or source for details. You can see example templates for installing chef-client here. This is an advanced feature, though, and it's not very well documented.

If you don't want to handle complexity of installing and managing your own chef-server, you can use free layer of Opscode's Hosted Chef, which is Chef-server SAAS offering and is free up to three nodes. I'd recommend starting any serious work with server anyway - chef-solo is as good as a decent bootstrap shell script, no more, and you're missing out on many important/interesting features like search and data bags, which allow you to configure your servers in a data-driven way.

Check out the knife-solo plugin, which can automatically install chef-solo on your remote server, upload your cookbooks onto it, and then run chef-solo. It basically automates what other folks who've answered this question have suggested doing.

Before each chef-solo run, the cookbooks should be present on that target machine, either by transferring it (via ftp/scp) or pointing the cookbook_path to a network share .

If you want the cookbooks to be automatically downloaded, you would need to run a Chef Server. Whether you want to run your own chef server, or use a hosted one from OpsCode is up to you, but it is needed.