by Onnie H. (8th Grade)

This summer, when coming back from America, I’m pretty sure I made everyone sitting next to me in the O’Hare Airport jealous of me. See, I was minding my own business, reading books, drawing in my notebook, making a pie… Yes, I made a pie. And it was delicious, might I add.

If we go back in time, we’ll see that I had gone to a thrift store with my cousins and grandma. We had pretty much gone through the entire store and my cousins and I decided to go look at furniture for some reason. We had gone through the furniture section when we saw a room jutting off of it. Inside, it was so random. There were clocks, lamps, fish tanks, ornamental rocks, sand toys, you name it. But there was also a mini pie maker, a mini donut maker, and a mini cookie iron. They were all essentially the same, waffle iron shape in a bright fire engine red. These were too good to resist, so of course we took them. They were only two dollars each, a steal!

Further into the summer, I was struck with inspiration. I would make a pie in Chicago! I made the pie dough two days before we left, and put cherry pie filling into an old gum bottle and a tiny jar. The original plan was to put the filling into shampoo bottles, but we couldn’t find any. The night before we left, I rolled out the pie dough and put all the ingredients onto a paper plate and into a plastic bag. The pie maker resided in my personal item (AKA my overstuffed backpack).

When we were going through security at Fort Wayne airport, the bin with the cherry filling got pulled to the side, and I was thinking that it was time to say goodbye to my wildest hopes and dreams. The scanner had apparently pulled it aside because it hadn’t recognized the “unusual substance” within. However, once the security guard saw that it was only some innocent cherry filling and was not poisonous or explosive, she gave it back to me.

Once in Chicago, we went through the entire airport only to find that I was right, and my mom had been wrong and we had gone the wrong way. So, we went all the way back and settled down at a table, which I was pleased to find had an outlet. Out came the pie maker and filling and dough (which had been stashed inside of my water bottle full of ice to keep it from melting) and I began my adventures. The one minor detail I had neglected to notice before this was that I had not learned how to use said pie maker. I had high hopes, however, and started to make the pie.

It took about fifteenish minutes to cook, and started to smell really, really good. When I took it out, it might not have been the most beautiful pie, but it was gorgeous in my eyes.
It tasted sort of like onions. What I didn’t know at the time was that I had stored the pie dough next to some onions for a taco bar, and I guess that the flavor sort of diffused into the dough. Otherwise, I thought it was really good, and I definitely recommend making a pie in the airport.