In today’s uncertain financial climate it’s easy to understand why some individuals and small businesses may not be able to donate to charities as generously as they have in the past.

A training organisation with a difference is bucking this trend by donating a percentage of its course costs to an environmental charity, the Australian Marine Conservation Society.
Train to Gain offers 100% online accredited Responsible Service of Alcohol, Hospitality and Food Safety Supervisor training. Company directors Brendan and Nat Bolton feel they have an obligation to do something to help preserve Queensland’s beautiful beaches and oceans.

Mr. Bolton says:

- “We both have many years experience working in the hospitality industry and have a real appreciation that each year many thousands of people travel great distances to enjoy all that Queensland has to offer.”

- “The hospitality industry in Queensland is greatly dependent on unique attractions such as the Great Barrier Reef and our amazing beaches and waterways,”

- ‘”We wanted to provide a service that is convenient and accessible to hospitality workers.”

-“We understand that even though training is extremely important, often the last thing someone wants to do after a long shift or on their day off is to spend hours doing face to face training.”

- “This is especially true of hospitality workers living in remote areas who have to travel long distances to do this training.”

- “Our courses are completed 100% online and people can gain the certificates they need at their own pace, in the comfort of their own home and at the right price. They can also print their certificates right away so they aren’t waiting for them to arrive in the mail.”

- “We pride ourselves on giving the best customer service in the business. We answer the phone on weekends, public holidays and even during Masterchef.”

Why this is a great way to get your RSA:

Train to Gain donates part of its course fees to the Australian Marine Conservation Society, a charity that’s committed to protecting Australia’s oceans and marine wildlife.
Tara Janssen from the Australian Marine Conservation Society said that as a not for profit charity, the Society depended on donations from businesses and individuals across the country.

“Train to Gain’s support for our work means we can continue working to free our oceans from pollution, overfishing and oil spills, and create a better future for our children and our precious ocean life,” Ms Janssen said.

Brendan and Nat don’t intend stopping their charitable activities there. They are also on the lookout for a charitable organisation to be associated with their online Food Safety Supervisor course.

“We gain a lot from helping organisations which do great work, so if a charity or organisation feel they would be interested in being associated with us, we would urge them to contact us via one of our websites.”

Train to Gain can be contacted at info@traintogain.com.au

Check out what they do at www.qldrsa.com.au or www.traintogain.com.au

Information about the AMCS can be viewed at www.amcs.org.com.au

All desserts except the ice cream (which is still the amazing Movenpick) are now homemade.

So far they have been selling really well so you guys should definitely come in and try them and then tweet/Facebook your verdict(s)….

The list includes the following;

1. Sorbet / Ice Cream from Movenpick

2. Sticky Date Pudding – made with blended dates and spices, served warm, with maple walnut ice cream and smothered with a brandy infusd butterscotch sauce.

3. Macadamia Nut Praline Parfait – served with middle eastern saffron pastry strips.

4. Classic French Brulee – served with a vodka jelly shot, strawberry compote and dark chocolate chip ice cream.

5. Dark Chocolate and Butterscotch Pannacotta – served with swiss chocolate ice cream.

6. Berry and Custard Tart chocolate line sweet pastry – served with cream custard, vanilla dream ice cream and blackberry crush.

7. Poached Vanilla Bean Pears – served with marscapone, short crust pastry and a sweet fig compote.

8. Affogatto – served with french vanilla ice cream with a shot of steaming hot espresso coffee add frangelico if you desire.

We know you guys are sweet enough, but Fish tends to be pretty light, so we had to make sure your entire palette is fully satiated!

If you’ve been out of town, or hiding under a media free rock – the owners, managers, chefs and staff from Sage Cafe, Yellowfin Seafood Restaurant and 1two3 Dining & Lounge Bar have stripped down and bared their souls (and some cute bottoms as well) to pose for nude photos for their first ever charity calendar.

The 2011 NUDE Restaurant Calendar features employees of the 3 restaurants (with ages ranging between early 20s to late 40s) strutting their stuff in the restaurants and kitchens, using fun props in strategically placed positions to cover up their naughty bits. Shot over three days the result is a collection of fun, vibrant, and cheeky photographs that all the participants are very proud of. Now lets get down to the bare essentials, we need YOU to purchase them so we can help support our 6 very lovely charities!

How can you help? Well glad you asked!
The calendars are now available for purchase directly through the restaurants and on-line via their websites!

Check out :
http://www.1two3restaurant.com.au/charity to purchase one of these fab calendars featuring our birthday suited beauties!!

The Charities:
The following organisations will all receive a share of the funds raised by the sale of our calendars.

Dreamworkers – this is a GC fund raising organisation that raises money to support the community by supporting local charities and individuals needing assistance http://www.dreamworkers.com.au/

Transformations – They are a Gold Coast organisation that offer counselling and recovery programs that assist sufferers of drug and alcohol addiction, grief, depression, post traumatic stress disorder, divorce and abuse. http://www.transformation.net.au/

The GC Community Fund – they organise community fundraising projects to raise money for distribution to local charities and individuals in emergency need http://www.gccommunityfund.org/

Pulmonary Hypertension Australia – this organisation provides hope, support and education for sufferers and carers of people with Pulmonary Hypertension. http://www.phaaustralia.com.au/

Beautiful You Foundation – this is a QLD based charity for women going through the journey of cancer. They organise complimentary mornings for women such as makeup, skin care, art classes, craft and jewellery making and they are now fund-raising to set up a special retreat for cancer sufferers and their families. http://www.beautiful-you.com.au/

Hannah’s Foundation – Drowning Prevention, awareness and family support based in QLD started by Andrew Plint (A QLD Police Officer) and his wife after losing their daughter, Hannah to a drowning in 2007 http://www.hannahsfoundation.org/

The Launch Party
Thursday 16th September 2010 was the date for our official launch party for the calendar – the charities all sent representatives and we all had a great night – check out the party video!

The organisers of the calendar wish to acknowledge a number of sponsors who donated time, props, products and expertise towards the making of the calendar; a huge heartfelt thank you to Fotoforce photography, Allure Hair & Makeup, Bliss Tanning in Broadbeach, Nonstop Adz, Retro Chef & Amore Coffee.

For further information or high resolution images please contact:
Justine Clarke
Marketing & Functions Manager
0404 118090

Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter: @yellowfindining
OR on Facebook : Yellowfin Seafood Restaurant
Social Media friends enjoy a 30% discount off your ENTIRE bill!

To purchase a 2011 Naked Calendar for Charity please click on the link! Cheers~

Naked Calendar Unleashed! from 1two3dining on Vimeo.

One of the highlights currently in the running is a marinaded lamb fillet chargrilled and served with meditteranean style cous cous finished with a slow cooked onion and tomato compote. $19.90 as an entree and $29.90 as a main.

It is a seriously good cut… real melt in the mouth stuff! mmm yum

Our second notable mention goes to the Sole fillets in a lemon and caper butter sauce with buttered parsley potatoes, steamed broccolini and a side of coleslaw $32.95

Lastly we are also changing the current bugs dish to Moreton bay bugs and king prawns in a chilli, cream and napoli sauce with steamed jasmine rice for $42.95.

So we hope you guys enjoy the new dishes and certainly feel free to comment and let us know your thoughts, if I was a betting man I’d reckon that the sole fillets will win the lot if this was a competition! Ha

On a side note, if you’re looking for a healthy alternative while dining out the Sole Fillet is an excellent choice for anyone who’s “counting”.  (Just make sure you ask for it without the butter sauce or have it on the side).  Serving Size: 3 oz, Calories: 92, Fat: 1g, Carbs: 0g, Protein: 20g

I hear a lot of the staff chatting about lean eating and cutting out certain foods to get ready for summer and I have to say that doing 40 days and 40 nights of strictly eating fish worked fabulously for me!

Another great recipe if you’d like to cook at home is:

We now also have a presence on Foursquare, the popular iphone app that allows people to ‘check-in’ to our venues and broadcast their locations and our special offers to their friends. Enough ‘check-ins’ with us and they could become the virtual ‘Mayor’ of our restaurant too. In addition to uploading our videos to YouTube, we are also broadcasting our footage on Vimeo (website) and Vidcall (iphone app), we upload weekly venue photos to our websites, facebook, restaurant blogs and Flickr. Then there is Digg – a site for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web – naturally we DIGG it!
Our customers can come in for dinner and drinks, have their photos taken or feature in one of our videos; they are then given one of our new social media cards and are directed to check out all our footage from the weekend on a variety of different on-line sites within a day or two.

One of our customers FRIENDS with our Social Media Card tucked away in a safe place…
Without a doubt one of the major benefits we have found from using Social Media is the amazing rapport that we have been able to create with our customers almost overnight. We are communicating on a daily basis with real people who we already know like our businesses via a variety of different mediums (we like to think we have got most bases covered). In addition to letting them know our specials and different events we might have coming up, there is now a two-way communication whereby we are chatting with them about things that interest them, we are contributing to random on-line conversations, they are commenting on our updates and our customers are beginning to relate to us as our friends rather than our patrons – a WIN/WIN situation! We get to chat with our ‘friends’ and hear their honest opinions about our businesses and they feel a new sense of loyalty towards us and are able to help us by referring their on-line friends to us. We know for a fact that this new rapport has already increased our customer base – what were once just happy customers are now very good friends…and we all like to see our friends succeed, don’t we?
Yes, the times are changing at a rapid rate, instead of spending thousands of dollars printing flyers and delivering them to 10’000 local letterboxes on a one-off basis (that is so 2009!!) we are now spending virtually nothing and communicating to potentially hundreds of thousands of people on a regular basis and in real-time.
A great example of how we have recently used the awesome power of Social Media is creating a pre-launch buzz for our Nude Staff Charity Calendar, check out our YouTube video of the calendar’s creation!

With no physical calendars to actually sell until they come back from the printers at the end of the month, we have already spread the word via Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and our blogs and have begun to take pre-orders and create a lot of interest with still a month to go.
We have already hosted some fantastic “Tweet Ups” – special dinners in our restaurants just for our Twitter followers and last year we more than half booked out one of our restaurants for a special event before we had even had the posters printed or started the usual promotional ring-around and all it took was creating an event on Facebook!
In addition to this, our campaign to once again be victorious in the Lifestyle Chanel’s I LOVE FOOD AWARDS (1two3 Mediterranean Restaurant was voted Australia’s Favourite Mediterranean Restaurant 2009) is off to a flying start with Facebook et al paving the way for thousands of our new best friends to follow a link here, click a tab there, register their vote, pass go and potentially win the $10’000 up for grabs just for voting in just a matter of minutes. Hey don’t just take my word for it – here is the link http://www.lifestylefood.com.au/ilovefoodawards see how easy it is for yourself (Yellowfin Seafood Restaurant – ‘Best Seafood Restaurant’ category…hint hint)
We feel that we are a great example of how businesses can utilise these fantastic new social media tools, we devote a lot of time and focus towards communicating via many different on-line mediums and it has really paid off for us. For any further information regarding how we are making social media work for us, feel free to contact me via email (or even better, look for us on Facebook – we would LOVE to be your friend!!)

Find our URLS to all things Social Media related below…happy Tweeting!

@SageRestaurant @Yellowfindining @1two3dining – Twitter

The generalized life cycle of a prawn: Prawn are pretty potandrous hermaphrodites, (both sexes) spending the early part of life cycle as males and the later part as females. Sorta like female teens growing up in the 90’s they dress like males but now are back to being female~

Wanna know how prawns get it on?

Breeding is usually complete by the end of October. Females lay eggs which remain attached to abdominal appendages until hatching in March and April, usually between 70-90 m water depth. Free-swimming larvae or nauplii spend 2-3 months in plankton.

Late and post-larvae remain in shallow water (less than 54 m) until winter months. Prawn reside in shallow water bays and inlets during first year because detritus from summer plankton and larger algae production supports amphipods and mysids which are preyed upon by young prawns. One year after hatching, at about 100 mm, prawns move to deeper (over 100 m) and by autumn males reach 150 mm. In fourth spring, at 200 mm, they change to females. Maximum life span is 5 years, but most live 4 years, and maximum length for males is 230 mm and 253 mm for females. But who says size matters right?

Every year at this time we hear a lot about proper handling of prawns and their storage.

The following information is a guide to proper storage procedures to ensure your products are enjoyed as they should be: fresh tasting and wonderful!

-You can keep fresh prawn on ice or refrigerated (about 380F) for up to 24 hours.
- Don’t forget to behead the prawn and take out the vein before eating!
-It’s very important that the prawns don’t sit in water. Place the prawn in a strainer with ice and have a pan underneath for catching the melt-water.
-If prawns are held fresh on ice or refrigerated for up to 2 days, we recommend they be deheaded as soon as possible and washed in cold water.
-For longer term storage, ice packed whole prawns should be processed (deheaded) and frozen at the end of a 1-day holding period.
-Frozen whole prawns store well for up to 12 months. Afterwards the tails appear to be softer than those of headless prawns frozen for the same period. Therefore, if you are not going to eat the head, it is best to dehead the prawn before freezing.
-When freezing prawns use a freezer bag (such as a ZipLock®). Add just enough water to cover the prawns. Squeeze the air out of the bag (caution not to puncture the bag) and seal. It is best to freeze prawns flat. Consider grouping prawns based on their size (i.e. freeze the small prawns in one bag and the larger prawns in another.)

The actual Beheading:
Assuming, you have a whole prawn, with head attached. The quickest way to behead a prawn is to pinch the base of the head and tear it off, then trim off the guts. You can throw away the head. My parents used to boil it and suck out the inside. They loved it. Not really for me though… eecch!

1. First, peel off all the scales.

2. Then, position the prawn with it’s back towards the top. You should see a dark “vein” just below the skin through the middle of the prawn from tail to head.

3. With a small pairing knife, cut into the prawn about ⅓ way deep (the knife will meet some resistance and that’s where you stop). Then, slice shrimp from ⅓ from the tail all the way towards the head (or the lack there of). The pros slice the entire length of the shrimp to clean the entire thing, but it is not essential.

4. In in the prawn’s back, is this dark blue/black/green “vein”. Using your knife, tease out the entire length of this vein and pull it out.

Done. It’s rather easy. It might be a little gross and intimidating the first time, but it gets easier.

Cooking prawns is even easier. Mix the prawns with salt, pepper, and whatever store bought savory sauce or spices you want. Cook it in a pan over medium heat with some olive oil. It is done when it turns pink and becomes a little stiff. I also LOVE to make Prawn kebobs, on the BBQ SO YUM!

TIP: Some fish monger measures the size of prawns using strange numbers such as 16/20 or 18/24. These numbers indicates how many prawns you get in a pound. So 16/20 means you will get 16 to 20 prawns in a pound.

Happy BeHeading!!!