Tricks and Treats: A Uni Watch Compendium for All Hallows’ Eve

[Editor’s Note: Today we have a guest entry from Gregory Koch, who’s compiled a bunch of uni-related tidbits relating to today’s date on the calendar. Enjoy. ”” PL]

By Gregory Koch

Today is Halloween, so I thought I’d put together some items that are appropriate for the occasion:

• The teams at Ichabod Crane High School, in Valatie, New York, are nicknamed the “Riders”, and both parts of the name come from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. The football team’s logo features a headless horseman carrying a football.

• On the same note, the teams at Sleepy Hollow High School in New York are nicknamed the Horsemen. They apparently even have a headless live mascot. (What do they do for bobblehead night?) You can see the logo on their basketball court, too.

• The Odessa Jackelopes of the CHL wore this Halloween jersey at some point, but I can’t find a year.

• The San Jose Sharks wore Halloween-themed practice jerseys in 2007.

• The Richmond Renegades of the ECHL wore this Halloween jersey design in 1999.

• Brook Lopez of the Nets wore black and orange shoes for Halloween in 2010.

• And in one of the greatest Halloween moves ever, Packers lineman Ken Ruettgers turned his helmet into a jack-o-lantern for a Monday-night throwback game that took place on Oct. 31, 1994.

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Fun with pumpkins, final edition: With Halloween now upon us, today is the last day of our pumpkin showcase. Here are the final submissions:

• Clever move by Jamey LaFleur, who used a green glow stick to create the neon snot lighting for this Seahawks pumpkin.

• “My boyfriend, Aaron, a Uni Watch member, carved this pumpkin of the scariest pitch in baseball, the knuckleball,” says Elizabeth Trotta.

• Chris Bentz carved a pumpkin in honor of his alma mater, Northern Illinois.

• Here’s a nicely executed Duke logo pumpkin by Jaryd Marquez.

• “This is why carving pumpkins with power tools is so much fun!” says Alison Brock. “You get to make your team proud — go Dawgs!

• “I made this pumpkin in honor of Miami’s win over previously unbeaten Ohio,” says Kevin Phillips.

• “My son John is the baseball and strength/conditioning coach at Jefferson Community College in Watertown, New York,” says Dave Northrop. “He carved this pumpkin to enter in a college contest with all proceeds going to Breast Cancer Research. At least there’s no pink anywhere on this gourd!”

• James Stapleton did two pumpkins: one for the San Francisco Dons and one to mark the Giants’ World Series championship.

• “My pumpkin-carving skills aren’t good enough for me to try the Twins’ TC logo,” says Tim McCabe, “so I settled for their M logo.”

•  Jason Kravec is our second reader this season to make an Oriole Bird pumpkin.

•  From Curtis Hall, a white A’s pumpkin — “in honor of the team’s white shoes,” he says.

• “Best pumpkin ever,” says the very modest Jose Armas, referring to his Dolphins carving.

• Mike Rowinski says he makes a 49ers pumpkin each year. Here’s this year’s model.

• And our final submission of the year comes from the Rev. Chris Lewis, who made this Louisville jack.

Big thanks to the many dozens of you who sent in your pumpkin pics. Here’s a slideshow featuring all of this year’s carvings:

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Culinary Corner: There’s nothing like a hurricane to bring on a craving for comfort food. On Monday, as Sandy was bearing down on us, I teamed up with my upstairs neighbors, Sam and Emily, to have a hurricane pot-luck. They made chili, and I figured I’d make a little roast — ideally a pork loin or maybe a rib end.

Unfortunately, my supermarket didn’t have any pork loins or rib ends left, so I had to buy a big-ass pork shoulder. It was a little over eight pounds — way bigger than I wanted — but pork shoulder is cheap, so it only cost ten bucks. I didn’t take a photo of it, but it looked very much like this:

My plan was to remove the bone, cut the resulting deboned shoulder into two pieces, and then roll and tie the two pieces into a pair of little roasts — one to cook and one to toss in the freezer for another day (or another hurricane).

The first task was removing the bone, which took about ten minutes of work with a boning knife (click to enlarge):

Then I cut the meat in half cross-wise, creating two roughly equivalent hunks that were about three-and-a-half pounds apiece. You can’t see it in that last photo, but the other side of the meat was completely covered in skin, which presented a choice for the roasts I was about to roll and tie: skin on or skin off? I decided to leave the skin on one of them and remove the skin for the other, leaving me with a nice sheet of skin that I could later use to make chicharones (i.e., cracklin’s).

Here’s how everything looked after I removed the skin from one piece of the shoulder and rolled and tied the roasts (click to enlarge):

I put the skin-on roast in the freezer, along with the skin. Next, I threw five cloves garlic into a food processor, along with some olive oil, salt, pepper, thyme, sage, and spices. A few pulses was enough to create a coarse paste, which I slathered onto the skinless roast. I then popped it into a 350 º oven for a little over an hour, until the internal temperature reached 145 º. I let it rest on the counter for another 10 minutes, during which time the temp increased to a little over 150 º.

Turned out very nicely, as you can see below (click to enlarge):

As you can see in that last photo, our meal included salad. Shameful, I know, but hurricanes sometimes lead us to do crazy things.

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Uni Watch News Ticker: With the NBA season tipping off last night, the Heat marked their championship by wearing an O’Brien Trophy patch and gold-outlined lettering. … Dolphins CEO Mike Dee has given another indication that a logo revision is in the works (from Jesse Agler). ”¦ Another day, another Astros leak. The twist this time is that MLB is blaming the leak on Hurricane Sandy, which is certainly a novel way of claiming that the dog ate your homework. … Excellent line from Michael Martin, who relayed the following comment from a friend’s wife who’s disgusted with the weekly uni changes exhibited by certain college football teams: “If you change uniforms every game, they’re not uniforms. They’re outfits.” Well put — we should all start using that one. … New alternate hoops uni for Indiana University of Pennsylvania. “I suppose since our mascot is the Crimson Hawks, our coaches felt it was appropriate to use the Atlanta Hawks template from the Adidas catalog,” says Tim Hipszer. … New rugby jersey for the British and Irish Lions (from Eric Bangeman). … G.I. Joe is out of control. … New uniforms for U.S. luge team, with some sort of comic book tie-in (from Kurt Esposito). ”¦ Some prep school in Oregon is getting custom shoes from Nike. “Ridiculous,” says Jay Francis). ”¦ Okay, this is weird: Beer in the Giants’ locker room following Sunday’s World Series win was placed in Tigers championship buckets (from Logan Rockmore). ”¦ In a related item, the goggles that the players wore during the champagne celebration had MLB logo creep (from Rick Fridel). ”¦ Kevin Zdancewicz notes that the program cover illustration for a preseason Bengals/Packers game a few months ago shows the Green Bay player wearing stirrups. ”¦ Look at this: a wishbone-O! (From Eric Trager.) ”¦ Rapper Kid Cudi is known for wearing Cleveland Indians caps, but he’s now working with New Era to change that. “Good to see popular music artists taking a stand against racist stereotypes being used as logos,” says Ryan Robey. ”¦ Professional poker player Greg Merson wore an ad-festooned Orioles jersey for last night’s World Series of Poker event (from Max Weintraub and Jason Christie). ”¦ Ball State football will wear black jerseys for the game against Ohio on Nov. 14. No photo yet, but the uni is mentioned in this article (from Kyle Shaner). …Kyle Mackie was watching ESPN’s Benji documentary and saw that Chicago’s Martin Luther King Jr. High School used nickNOBs on their warm-ups. ”¦ Brinke has spent this entire week watching video of the Giants’ World Series win over and over and over. And now he’s noticed something: As the on-field celebration started after the final out, a kid (maybe one of the batboys?) came out and picked up all the caps and gloves being throw into the air. “Always wondered who did that,” says Brinke. ”¦ Ohio State linebacker Ryan Shazier, who changed his uni number last weekend to honor a friend with muscular dystrophy, may make the number change permanent (from Tony Crespo). ”¦ The ’Skins will be wearing their throwbacks this weekend.

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Sandy update: It’s now clear that I was incredibly fortunate. For me, Monday was pretty much just another rainy, windy day. But many of my friends are still without power, and countless people in my city and surrounding region suffered significant property damage (not to mention the pain and suffering caused to Astros fans by MLB Advanced Media!). Although the subways still aren’t running and the city’s schools are still closed, neither of those things affects me, since I work from home and don’t have kids.

Seeing the TV reports showing all the damage, when I came through completely unscathed, is hard to process. It’s sort of like watching a movie. I wouldn’t say I have survivor’s guilt, but I’m definitely feeling a disconnect between what I experienced and what happened elsewhere in the city. It’s all a bit surreal.

My continued thanks to everyone who inquired and expressed concern about how I was doing — all greatly appreciated.