My family's eating habit

Living in Shenzhen (an urban city near Hong Kong) in China, my family shares something in common with the Dong's family in Beijing.
Both my parents cook. My mom tends to cook more often and focus more on everyday food. But whenever my dad cooks, he can always make something different. He is the one who can be sometimes creative about cooking, the one who always tries new things. He can even invent his own dishes and name it Li's Favorite. And here is a look of the kitchen.

One thing you may notice in the kitchen of a typical Chinese family like mine is that there is a range hood. It is because we stir fry a lot and that process usually generates much smoke. And also almost all of the Chinese family have rice cookers in their kitchens. As the starch of Chinese, how can we live without rice!

Below are receipts of my family's spending on food in a week or so. When added together, we spent about $417.04 and that's for a family of five (including some cleaning supplies). But notice that this week is the celebration of Chinese New Year, so we tended to spend more on food. Chinese people aren't big fans of weekly shopping, because a big component of our diet are vegetables. And vegetables can't usually stay fresh  for all the week. So what we do is that we will do a big food shopping once a week and get nonperishable stuff like oil, snacks, drinks, flour, rice etc. We spent about $90 on vegetables in this week (about  20% of all the expenditure), and $120 on meat and seafood (my family is a big fan of seafood, about 29%).  Since it is Chinese New Year, I also notice that there are about $60 spent on ingredients making dumplings (it is kind of like a  tradition to have dumplings on New Year). One thing stands out to me is that we have a relative healthy eating habit, with only $11 spent on snacks such as candy and chocolate and sodas. Another thing surprises me is that we spent about $56.5 on Camellia oil ("the Olive oil of Asia"). The reason why it is so expensive may probably be the great health benefits it has. And just for giggle, although my family's eating habit is relatively healthy, although it is not on the receipts here and although it is in China, my parents had Mc Donalds once in this week and spent about $10.

In a traditional Chinese family, people dine together almost every night. For my family, we would sometimes wait for all the family members to begin our supper. Here are pictures of my dining room. It is relatively small compared to some of the "Long Long Tables" I saw here in the U.S. However, we never feel crowded sitting together. It gives us just enough space and makes us feel more closely related. And maybe, that's how we build up our family connections.