Making jQuery background color animations?

I am trying to fade-in to a background color when the page displays.
Unfortunately, the core jQuery library doesn't seem to be able to animate 'background-color', it only supports numeric values.

Apparently you need the jQuery color plugin. But I cannot find that anywhere!

Another message on stackoverflow tells me that I need to include jquery-ui.js, but this is a bit dated (2 years ago).
How do I get this to work?

Below is my current code:

<script type="text/javascript">
    $(document).ready(function () {
        $('#mydiv').animate
           ({ "background-color": "antiquewhite" }, 1000);
    });
</script>

Nicholas Deweert, Apr 20, 2011