I admit that the unit I was least looking forward to in the Plant-Based Professional culinary course that I just finished was the raw gastronomy. The extent of my raw food experience was visiting a raw restaurant in San Diego about 10 years ago. It was delicious, but my dabbling ended there.

But you know what? It ended up being a fascinating topic. I love learning new and creative ways to make foods, and the techniques involved in raw gastronomy are really interesting.

One of the assignments was to create a raw pâté from soaked nuts or seeds. The sample recipe used almonds, but I had a slew of raw sunflower seeds on hand and decided to give them a whirl. Figuratively and literally.

First, you soak the sunflower seeds in water. Then, you blend them up with garlic, lemon, salt … whatever you like. The result is light-colored and smooth (not silky smooth, but smooth enough) – and really addictingly tasty.

The possibilities are pretty endless, but in this case, I wanted to make a healthy canapé.

One of my favorite recipes before becoming vegetarian, many years ago, was a smoked salmon ball. And while I haven’t made that in years, I thought it would be fun to try to recreate some of those flavors in this pâté. So I added dill and smoked paprika and while, of course, not an exact replica, the smoky flavors are perfect with the dill and cucumber.

(Note that the smoked paprika is not officially raw because it reaches a temperature higher than is required to qualify as raw food. So if you’re on a raw diet, you might want to leave it out.)

I love this smoky sunflower seed pâté, and I love these appetizers, too!

For my plant-based party, I decided to garnish the cucumber slices with borage flowers. I planted borage a few years ago to attract bees to the veggie garden. I knew they were edible (apparently, they taste mildly of cucumber) but never had the guts to actually eat them. Until now. They ended up making a beautiful garnish, though you couldn’t actually taste them at all.

Sunflower seed pâté is officially a part of my life now, and this easy cucumber appetizer is going to be coming out of my kitchen often. It’s so easy to make the pâté ahead of time, squeeze it on, garnish, and serve.

Oh, and you could totally swap out the borage for cherry tomato halves and you have the perfect Christmas appetizer! See?!

Okay, now please forget that I mentioned Christmas.

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