The fade-in after the credits finds Joyce Chen beyond the kitchen counter whacking at meat with a cleaver. She greets the viewer and announces that today she is going to make a sweet and sour dish "the way you like it if you like Chinese food." The preparation will involve frying meat and pouring a sweet and sour sauce over it. For today's demonstration, she has chosen pork to fry. She recommends a boneless cutlet and suggests whacking it a bit with a cleaver to tenderize it. The meat must then be cut into pieces and marinated. The frying mixture requires exactitude in quantities of ingredients, she declares and admonishes the viewer "you have to follow me exactly." She pours out various ingredients, noting that a chopstick is very useful at leveling off ingredients in measuring cups. Once her batter is done, she rolls pork pieces in it and puts the covered morsels one by one into an electric fryer. As the pork fries, she announces that she will repeat the batter ingredients and amounts, and a dissolve takes us to the Chinese figurines each of which is bearing a card with the ingredient/measure. When we return to the image of Chen at the deep fryer, she starts taking out the golden-brown pieces with great care and explains that it is her responsibility to teach the viewer not only to cook for tasty results but with safety. She pours the cooked pork into a dish and puts it aside. The pork will need a second quick frying just at the end, but now she is going to show the viewer how to do the sweet and sour sauce. The best Chinese sweet and sour sauces, she recommends, have either vegetable or fruit chunks in them to add flavor and color. She will use pineapple, green pepper, and carrot, and she shows how to use a "rolling cut" to get all the pieces of carrot fairly comparable in size. Chen enumerates all the ingredients of a sweet and sour sauce, and this time we dissolve not to Chinese figures but to a lattice work that at various points has cards with the ingredients and measures hanging from it. (No doubt, the fact that the figurines had already been used earlier in the episode meant that it would be hard to set them up with new ingredients during the taping of a live show with no retakes.) Chen explains that vinegar should be the last ingredient into the sauce since it burns away if it is added too early. She recounts how in China, vinegar is often put on the table for guests to dip food into but then people will often joke that a person who takes too much vinegar must have a jealous personality. She herself, she laughs, generally refuses an offer of vinegar at the dinner table since she doesn't want to be accused of jealousy. She gives the pork a second frying and pours the sweet and sour sauce over it. The dish must be served piping hot, so she proceeds to the lattice-work dining room where fried rice, egg rolls, and spare ribs await on the table as additional parts of the meal. Chen sits down and explains that a Chinese cook would typically declare to her guests that the food isn't all that good, since one is supposed to be modest about one's culinary skills. However, "between you and me," as she puts it, this dish is "very good. . . excellent." She signs off.