Be Watchful of Your Receipts

Last week I ordered a pizza to be delivered and paid for it with my debit card. When the driver arrived, he gave me the receipt to sign and then gave me my copy to keep. I gave the driver a couple of dollars in cash for a tip.

Today, when I looked at my online bank statement, that transaction posted to my checking account for almost $4 more than it should have been.

I checked with the bank, who assured me they ran the transaction as they received it from the business.

When I called the business, the manager was very helpful in trying to resolve the problem. With the information from the receipt I had in my hand -- I keep all receipts until I've reconciled them with my bank statement, and sometimes longer -- he was able to determine that the transaction showed that I tipped with the card (not cash) and had been processed for the higher amount.

Now, there is no way to know (or prove) if the driver helped himself to a tip from my account, or if he entered the tip in the computer on my card accidentally when it should have come from another customer's card.

More importantly, this happened because I wasn't being watchful. I signed the receipt without marking through or zeroing out the allotted space for the tip. When I'm in a restaurant, I'm always careful to zero out that line if I'm leaving a cash tip, but this time I just didn't do it.

Lessons learned here: #1 - always put something in that tip line, preferably with a dollar sign in front of the number so it can't be altered. #2 - it may be better to just not pay for delivery pizza with a debit card, and instead pay cash at the time of delivery.

The company promised to investigate further so that if they do indeed have a problem with the driver, they can deal with him appropriately. They made good with me by offering to either refund me the amount I was overcharged or to give me a free large pizza.

Not one to make a foolish mistake twice, I took the pizza.

Odds and Ends

My attention focused elsewhere currently, but I thought I'd put up a quick post for my regular readers (all three of you).

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Last weekend we celebrated my daughter's 24th birthday (her birthday was actually Wednesday) by going to an Ethiopian restaurant called The Blue Nile. The food is primarily meat and potatoes stewed in spicy gravies. Everything was delicious, and the real fun of the meal was that we didn't use flatware. Instead we used a pancake like bread called injera to scoop up the food, or we just used our fingers. We four adults (Shane, my daughter, her boyfriend and myself) thought the food was wonderful. Kat was a little less enthusiastic, but she loved the Beef Sambusa appetizer, and ate most of the Doro Watt (a chicken dish) on both platters we ordered. Despite the jokes about starving Ethiopians, we were absolutely stuffed by the time we left, as evidenced by these before and after photos of our plates. You can find out everything included on the platters by looking at Item #19 on this menu.

Before

After

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If you're so inclined, here are a couple of new (new-to-us, anyway) adult beverages to try. The first is Tusker Lager. It's a Kenyan lager that is light, yet full-flavored like a dark beer. It will be a special occasion beer for us because it is expensive ($45 per case of 24).


The second it Wild Turkey American Honey. This is a bourbon distilled with natural honey. It is wonderful in a bourbon and Coke (my favorite mixed drink) but is sweet and smooth enough to enjoy straight up or on the rocks. A fifth costs about $18.

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My entire week has been out of whack. First the holiday, then Shane came home sick Tuesday afternoon and missed all of Wednesday because rain shut the job-site down. Having him at home during the work week puts a halt to any kind of housekeeping groove I'm in, although I have to admit that yesterday we worked at getting a van load of things to the thrift store and several boxes of items listed on craigslist or half.com. I wouldn't have been able to get all of it done by myself. Still, here it is Friday and I feel like I accomplished little this week.

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If swear that if I didn't have a biological need to sleep, I wouldn't. There are so many things I need or want to do on any given day that it seems like sleep is a great waste of time.

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I may not be around for a few days, but no worries. I'm just working on some other projects here at home.

A Review: Mavi Casual Italian

We tried a new restaurant last night for our January meal out*. It's called Mavi Casual Italian, a small local chain of restaurants with one store right here in our neighborhood. The Mavi chain is something of a spin-off of the locally-famous Cascone chain of restaurants.

Orders are placed at the front counter and the food is brought to your table. If you're thinking it's sounds similar to Fazoli's, then think again. The food at Mavi's is good. And the atmosphere is a lot less pre-fab than Fazoli's.

The specialty at Mavi is spedini (sometimes spelled "speidini"). Definitions of spedini vary, but it's basically grilled meat, sometimes lightly breaded, sometimes skewered. Shane had "Frank's Diablo Chicken Spedini" -- the sauce was a slightly spicy marina -- with the Tossed Italian Salad. I had Soto Shrimp Spedini, which was shrimp in a lemon-white wine sauce with provolone cheese, mushrooms and artichoke hearts. I chose the Classic Caesar Salad. Kat had the (very generous) Kids' Penne with Meatball meal.

We also ordered the Cheese Ravioli with Meatball; those of you who've met Shane know he sometimes likes to have seconds. As it turned out, his spedini was enough and we brought the ravioli home for Kat's and my lunch today. All of the meals came with a slice of garlic toast, and the spedini meals included Alfredo penne pasta.

The food was very good, service was friendly and fast, and the restaurant was clean (and busy by the time we left around 6:30 p.m.). Our only disappointment was that they were out of tiramisu.

The prices ranged from $3.99 for Kat's meal, to $11.99 for my shrimp entree. We used a restaurant.com gift certificate and ended up paying just $17 for all four meals plus drinks (including the price of the discount gift certificate).

Our suburb doesn't have any other Italian restaurants, so we are pleased to have Mavi here. We'll be going back!

The Mavi Casual Italian locations are: 8678 NE Flintlock Rd in Liberty, 704 E. North Ave. in Belton, and 19321 E. 40 Highway in Independence.



* We try to go out for a meal just once a month, to someplace new or somewhere a little nicer than A drive-thru or pizza buffet. It doesn't always work out that way, but we try; we seem to appreciate dining out more the less we do it.

Weekly Menu - 12/16 thru 12/22

More change-ups in the weekly menu. We were supposed to have gone out last Saturday night to a Mexican restaurant as an early celebration for my birthday. We canceled because of bad weather and I moved a meal up from this week's plan.

We did manage to get out on Sunday, thinking we'd go out for Italian food, but winding up at Forbes Woodfire Grill instead. It was our first time there and I enjoyed it a lot. I had the Dijon Salmon and Chicken Madiera combo plate, while Shane had a beef-pork-chicken combo. We neither one cared much for their calamari since it was served in large, rectangular chunks instead of delicate rings, but the rest of our food was great. We'll probably go back sometime.

The entire weekly menu looks something like this:

Sunday: Out to eat at Forbes Woodfire Grill

Monday: Shane's "Upside-Down" Tater Tot Casserole, Green Beans with Mushrooms and Carrots

Tuesday and Thursday: "Grilled" Pot Roast with Potatoes and Carrots, Peas, Rolls

Wednesday: Herbed Pork Chops, Cornbread Pudding, Collard Greens

Friday: Turkey Tettrazzini (using the last cup or so of frozen leftover Thanksgiving turkey), California Mixed Veggies, Garlic Toast, Jello with Fruit

Saturday: Family Christmas Party hosted by one of my sisters. She's taking care of all the food, but in lieu of a gift exchange, we're doing a cookie exchange. My contributions will be Raspberry Coconut Bars and Cherry Walnut Fingers. The recipes will be posted by the end of the week.

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A Little Thing To Save Money: We used a gift certificate for our meal at Forbes, saving us about 30% on our meal.

A Little Thing To Simplify Our Lives: Getting Kat to brush her teeth is usually a struggle that takes up to ten minutes some nights. We found an inexpensive toothbrush that has a light built into the handle that flashes for 60 seconds. The "rule" is that she has to brush until the light stops flashing...once for her upper teeth and once for her lower teeth. She thinks brushing is fun now.