Assyrian cuisine tomato sauce and baked in the oven, not unlike the Levantine version of moussaka), "shamakhshi" (fried rolled eggplant stuffed with ground beef in tomato sauce), "Dolma" (rice and tomato sauce stuffed in grape leaves, cabbage, various peppers, zucchini, and eggplant), "Masgouf" (fish spiced with olive oil, salt, and turmeric, topped with tomatoes, potatoes, and onions then oven-baked) and "Lahmacun" (flatbread topped with ground beef, tomato paste, spices, and onions). Sesame seeds are important to the cuisine and used to make tahini, there is even an Assyrian folk tale about the gods drinking sesame wine on the night before they created
Lotus seed paste to produce a smooth, sweet paste. The lotus paste used by most Chinese cooks requires further preparation by dry cooking the sweetened paste over heat with caramelized sugar and vegetable oil. This produces a lotus paste that is tan coloured with a satiny sheen, which is rich, sweet, and silky with a slight fragrance of caramel. Some cooks choose to treat the dried lotus seeds with a lye solution before initially stewing them in order to shorten their cooking time. Lotus paste is used in Chinese cuisine as a filling for mooncake, "baozi", and other sweet pastries. Another common use