My boyfriend loves gadgets. He is by far one of the most gadgety people I've ever met. Going to Target with him is a dangerous proposition: he will happily spend an entire afternoon wandering the aisles of the electronics department in a gleeful daze, coming to life only occasionally to pull something off the shelf and announce, "I'm getting this." Grocery shopping is just as hazardous, because every grocery store I've been to with him has a cookware section. If it slices, dices, pulverizes, or serves food in a visually arresting manner, he is drawn inexorably to it like a moth to a ceiling lamp.
And yet, he doesn't own a food processor.
This became an issue one recent Saturday as we prepared to go shopping for dinner ingredients. I wanted pesto. I craved pesto. I was horrified by the thought of buying premade pesto for dinner, when it's so easy and satisfying to make at home. But I'd never made pesto without a food processor before. So I turned to the Internets to see if you could, in fact, make pesto entirely by hand.
