How To Kill Ants

I'd like to apologize for the little break that Lizzie and I have taken lately! Life's been kicking us both around, but we've both been cooking and homemaking like little hummingbirds, so we're back to share it with you again.

I wanted to come back with a recipe, and there are many in the offing, but today I wanted to share a quick tip with you.

Our house is apparently built on top of Ant Manhattan. Every summer, we have to be very careful about keeping everything edible in tightly-sealed jars, because the first time you leave anything out, suddenly there's an ant superhighway leading across the house to it. They're just tiny black ants, not offensive in small numbers, but when they come in droves to gather cat food, it gets a bit gross.

The thing is that we didn't want to put out poisons because of the risk to our cats; we didn't want sprays or ugly traps around, so we needed a natural, nontoxic way to get rid of the ants. Acting on a tip from an acquaintance, I bought a box of Cream of Wheat.

Yep, I said Cream of Wheat! The same tasty porridge you loved as a little kid. Ants love it too. They love it so much that only one day after I put down 1/4 cup of it in a pile, the pile is almost gone. They take it back to the colony and share it around with all their friends and family. And then it puffs up inside them and kills them.

It won't hurt your pets (unless you have a free-range ant farm), it won't hurt you, it doesn't stink... it has no nasty side effects whatsoever. But whenever I've sprinkled it in an area where ants congregate, the ants have disappeared overnight.

So if summer has brought in an invasion of the only nonhuman creature known to engage in agriculture and organized warfare, fight back with the product of our own agriculture. Cream of Wheat, man. It'll do the trick!