Q:

Chef (well, Test Kitchen) hanging when using local cookbook

I am new to Chef, trying to put together a POC for my company.
So I've got a project that has two cookbooks under the cookbook folder. One cookbook is a "base" cookbook called 'hydra-base', the other (called 'automator') is supposed to extend it. Right now all I have is a test in the extending cookbook, and a recipe invocation.
My problem is when I attempt to verify it with Kitchen, everything uploads ok until it gets to trying to apply the recipe, then I get the following line:
Recipe:  hydra-base::default and then kitchen just hangs. It has been idle for about 45 minutes now. If I break out of the tool (ctrl-c) then rerun kitchen converge, it gives me this error then hangs: 
[2018-01-09T17:35:23+00:00] WARN: Chef client 1514 is running, will wait for it to finish and then run.
So it appears that chef still thinks its trying to update something. Here are the relevant files:
# automator/recipes/default.rb
include_recipe 'hydra-base::default'

# automator/Berksfile
source 'https://supermarket.chef.io'

cookbook 'hydra-base', path: '../hydra-base'
metadata

# automator/metadata.rb
depends 'hydra-base'

calling kitchen verify -l debug does not seem to provide any additional information after the line that hangs. 
Can someone please give me a hint on how to fix this or how to get more information out of kitchen?
Thanks

A:

It turns out that AWS was just excruciatingly slow and apt-get (applied in the base) was timing out. I would have known this had I gone back earlier and tried testing the base cookbook.

