A better way to organize the recipes?

[timu]

I am struggling with the best way to organize my recipes. Basically I
want to make mimic the way chef organizes their recipes and also try
to get something like puppet style mix ins.

What this means is that I want to set up each recipe as a standalone
bundle with it's own templates and script.

And then I want to be able to say something like this.

ubuntu:
custom-bash-settings
essential-sysadmin-packages

my_host1
ubuntu
apache
postgres-primary

my_host2
ubuntu
postgres-standyby
postfix

Etc.

Has anybody tried at organizing the scripts so that they are
inheritable or mixable?