Ghriba (Moroccan pistachio and chickpea flour cookies)

When I was in Paris last November I found myself perusing the window displays of the many North African bakeries, entranced by the delicious looking offerings on sale. Particularly the makrouth and montecao (a shortbread type cookie). It was when I was making a batch of montecao the other weekend that I decided to use half the dough to make some ghriba - a cookie of many shapes and forms found over North Africa. I had an awful lot of pistachios in the cupboard, so decided that my cookies would be pistachio based. Incidentally 'ghriba' in Arabic means strange or foreign, indicating possibly that these cookies come from elsewhere. They are popular among the North African Jewish communities so it is possible that they arrived via Spain...

A note about chickpea flour, uncooked it has a beany flavour with a slightly bitter aftertaste however once cooked it gives the cookies a delicious creamy texture with no flavour. As with most of my recipes, quantities are approximate and nothing particulary bad should happen if you use a little more or less...

Ingredients
1 cup chick pea flour
100g blanched ground pistachios
1/2 cup sugar
50g margarine
Pinch of salt
4 cardamom pods (remove seeds and grind)
Natural green food colouring (optional)

1. If you can’t buy ready blanched peeled pistachios (can anyone?), boil for a few minutes and then plunge into cold water. Remove the skins (an easy way is to put your hands in the water and rub the pistachios between your fingers, the skins should sink to the bottom of the bowl), and once de-skinned blend to a paste. It doesn’t have to be too smooth.
2. Add the chickpea flour to a bowl and mix with the sugar and ground cardamom seeds.
3. Stir in the ground pistachios, it doesn’t matter if the resulting mixture is a little lumpy
4. Melt the margarine, and slowly add to the dry ingredients (along with green food colouring if using).  This is one of those recipes that doesn’t hinge on exact amounts, if your ground pistachios are more of a paste than a powder then you’re likely to need less margarine. You want the dough to form a fairly tight ball with minimal crumbliness. Chickpea flour contains no gluten so you need something to help it stick together
5. Pinch off small pieces of dough (slightly smaller than golf ball size, I tried to think up a suitable comparison object but drew a blank… ) roll into balls and place on a baking tray
6. Bake for 15-20 minutes in a 175C oven, the cookies will initially be quite soft so leave on the baking tray until cooled. While they are still soft you can decorate them with slithers of almonds, pine nuts or pistachios.
7. Eat, perfect with coffee or mint tea if you are so inclined…