moroccan food

https://i.imgur.com/DawV07W.jpg (image reference)

>Couscous
is the national dish (pic 1), traditionally eaten every Friday. It's basically semolina with a beef stew on top. Lots of different styles (chicken apart from beef, every family having its own variation on vegetable choice, etc).

>tajine
which is a general term used for meat dishes, although tajine also designates the clay pot in which it's cooked (pic 2).
Most well-known (and a favorite of mine) is lamb tajine with prunes. Moroccan lamb generally has a lot less fat than European lamb.

>pastilla
is a meat pie made with very thin and cracking layers of dough (pic 3), with a mix of almonds and pigeon inside. Well, nowadays, it's also common to see it with chicken (or seafood) inside, but it's traditionally prepared with pigeon. Not cheap, but honestly delicious.

Coming back to meat dishes, if you ever go to Marrakesh, try out Tangia. It's meat cooked inside a special clay pot for up to 7 or 8 hours at a time inside a traditional hammam fireplace. Traditionally only cooked by men.

Other than main dishes, when it comes to soup, there's
>harira
Well, I can't really describe it, because each family's harira is unique, really, but it's generally thick soup with lentils, chickpeas, spices, tomatoes, and from then on, it's whatever you want (pic 4).
Harira is mostly served during ramadan in order to open the fast-breaking meal, and is served with a fuckload of things on the side like eggs, dates, dried fruits, traditional sweets, etc.

There's also bissara, which is a bean soup, generally eaten during winter. It's also a dish in Egyptian cuisine, apparently.

Morocco has over 3000km of coastline, so we have a fuckload of fish. You can find pretty much everything fresh in markets, including but not limited to sardines (we're the world's #1 exporter), sole, swordfish, tuna, tarbot, mackerel, shrimp, congre eel, skate, red snapper, spider crab, lobster and a variety of mollusks.

You'll often find small restaurants near the markets that you can bring fish you just bought to and get it cleaned + cooked.

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Sweets and snacks: https://i.imgur.com/zmGic59.jpg

Those things at the center are msemen, also called moroccan crepes. Kind of thick but excellent... hard to express the texture, honestly.
Then, there's baghrir, the thing with a lot of holes on the left. They're also sometimes called moroccan crepes abroad, and are generally heated in a pan filled with honey + butter so they're literally oozing with those. A real delicacy.

Afterwards, there's the various moroccan dry sweets, which are generally made with almond (prevalent ingredient in Moroccan cuisine), can be seen at the top left. Speaking of almonds, the little bowl to the right of msemen contains something called amlou, which is almond paste with a fuckload of other nuts added and grounded, and it's pretty fucking delicious.