Home-made pesto, stone age edition

We both love pesto very much, and it is great in sandwiches, pasta and as dipping sauce.  I make a batch of pesto every time after giving my basil plants a haircut.  Today's pesto is special though, because we used the traditional way of using a mortar and pestle ONLY.

The picture here shows Mr Hippo in action. Making pesto with the mortar and pestle turned out a fairly labor-intensive task, and by the end of it we were both exhausted.  By comparison, it is a piece of cake to use a blender.  This is the time when you have to appreciate modern technology, I guess. 

But the #1 reason for using the stone age technique, apart from shaping our muscles,  is that we can control how coarse the pesto is.  We are not a big fan of pesto that is too fine/runny, and with the stone-age technique, we can just stop grinding whenever we like/exhaust ourselves. 

We canned about three cups of pesto (without Parmesan cheese), which will be good in the fridge for a couple of weeks.  I had also successfully kept pesto in the freezer for months so that we had home-made pesto all year round :)  If memory serves me right, I got that idea from French women don't get fat.