My Weevils

Yesterday morning, I decided that I wanted to make pancakes.

I'm not a regular pancake maker, but had been sticking to Bisquick during recent batch preparations. I remembered that I had this oat bran pancake mix in my cupboard, and wanted to try that instead.

So I grabbed the paper bag of mix, ignored the expiration date from 2006 (it's grains...how can they expire?), and started preparing.

One egg, lightly beaten.

Canola oil.

Pancake mix

After scooping 1/3 cup of the mix into the bowl, I saw what looked like a small moth-bug. Yuck! Must have landed in the bowl somehow. How could I have missed that? I should have inspected the bowl more closely.

So, I rinsed out the bowl and started over.

Only this time, I looked into the pancake mix.

The top layer of mix was covered with those black-ish small moth bug. It took me a good 30 seconds, and my digging deeper into the mix to see the actual refined oat bran, to realize that these things were not whole grains. They were bugs.

Gross.

I looked in the cupboard and saw a couple of them on the shelf. So I cleaned everything out of the cupboard (it's a very small one), threw out all other items that expired before 2008 (um...no comment), and gave it a thorough cleaning.

I went about my day and was pleased with my extermination skills.

Later, I decided to whip up ziti and a quick tomato sauce for dinner. I bought a large bag of pine nuts at BJ's earlier this year, and thought some toasted pine nuts would go well in the sauce. I went back to the aforementioned cupboard, and retrieved those.

I figured a sealed bag was safe.

I opened the bag to find not moth bugs, but rather a cobweb-ish lattice covering the top layer, and what appeared to be some larvae.

Gross.

I don't know if these incidents are connected or not, but it's clear to me that not all of my grain comestibles are dead.