1. Turn the oven to 180C.
2. Add the butternut to a baking dish, toss with a little olive oil and salt. Cover the butternut with tin foil and bake for 30 minutes or until soft.
3. Place a pot on medium heat, add a little olive oil, and then the onions. Cover the pot and cook the onions gently for 20 minutes until soft, jammy and lightly caramelised.
4. Once the butternut and onions are cooked, prepare your filling. Add the butternut, onions and remaining filling ingredients to a bowl, stir everything together, and add salt to taste. Set the filling aside until needed.
5. Next, we need to build our spiral pie or börek! To do this we need a long thin sheet of phyllo pastry, which we will then roll into a long tube stuffed with filling, and curl into a snail shape.
6. Place a sheet of phyllo in front of you, and cover the rest of the phyllo sheets with a slightly damp towel to prevent it from drying out. Open your sheet of phyllo up lengthways in front of you, like a book. Brush the whole sheet of phyllo very lightly in olive oil, using a pastry brush.
7. Now we need to join two sheets of phyllo together to make a longer sheet. Take a new sheet of phyllo from the pile and open it up. Place it to the right of the first sheet, open like a book, before gently overlapping the two sheets by 2 cm along the shorter edge to form one long sheet, with an overlapping seam in the middle anchoring them together.
8. Brush the new sheet with olive oil. The oil will act as both a glue and an agent to help the pastry get crispy. Should you have trouble sticking your sheets together, simply add a little more oil.
9. Now take a third sheet, and place it directly on top of sheet 1. Brush sheet number three lightly with oil, before taking a final fourth sheet and placing this over sheet two (it will overlap slightly over sheet three as well). Phyllo can be rather delicate, hence the need to double up the layers and stop the filling from spilling out.
10. To make understanding the above instructions easier, you can find the step-by-step video HERE
11. Spoon the filling in a long, thin, sausage along the long edge of your pastry sheet. The sausage should be about 3cm in diameter. If you run out of filling before the end of the pastry, simply trim off the excess.
12. Start rolling the pastry away from you around the filling, until you are left with a nice long cylinder of pastry, stuffed with veggie filling. Brush your pastry cylinder lightly in olive oil.
13. Roll your pastry into a snail shape, and transfer it to baking dish. You can use any dish shape, but I find circular dishes will help the börek keep its shape.
14. Before popping your börek in the oven sprinkle over a few sesame seeds, if you have them.
15. Bake your börek at 180C for 30-40 minutes until golden. Remove the börek from the oven, scatter over the chopped parsley and a few pomegranate seeds, and serve alongside my Green Hummus, Iranian Cucumber and Yogurt Sauce and Marinated Aubergines (which can be found on our Easter Feast post here) as part of a truly special Middle Eastern-inspired feast.

Happy cooking x