The fade-in finds Joyce Chen behind the kitchen counter. She is going to explain how to grow and cook bean sprouts (but, she says with a smile, she doesn't need to show how to eat them since everyone will know how to do that). There are two main types of bean sprouts from China -- yellow soy bean sprouts, and green sprouts (also known as mung beans). Americans seem to prepare the green variety so that is what she is going to work with primarily on this episode. One can find the beans at a Chinatown grocery store or, as she says, an "Oriental grocery store." To grow the sprouts, one starts with dried beans and puts them into a flower pot. To prevent them from falling out the hole in the bottom, one can buy a sink drainer from any hardware store and put that in the bottom of the pot. The beans are rinsed in water and the pot is covered and put in a dark, dry, but not hot, space such as a basement or a closet or in a cabinet under the kitchen sink. Chen herself has chosen the latter for today's demonstration. She's already made up several batches that have been stored for a variety of intervals so she can show the viewer what happens over a period of time. She removes three pots from below the sink and shows us beans that have aged for a day, for two days, and for even long than that. One should stop the growth process before the beans reach 2 inches in length. The root stem needs to be taken off and that was a job Chen didn't like earlier in her life, so she didn't eat bean sprouts until she could learn to reconcile herself to the task. Bean sprouts are a very inexpensive product so she really recommends them. But she counsels against the canned sprouts that one can sometimes find in grocery stores as these have lost their sweetness, freshness, and original texture. In Chinese cuisine, everything in the dish should be fashioned to about the same size for cooking, so if one is, for instance, making sprouts with meat, the meat should be cut to about the same shape as the sprouts. One can use pork (the most typical choice) or beef. (Later, she will also suggest chicken). After the meat is cut up, one can prepare the other ingredients such as scallions (also cut to the same shape as the sprouts). By cutting everything in advance, the Chinese avoid the need to have knives at the dining table. And it also is advisable to cut everything in advance since the ingredients will be going into a quick stir fry that will be so fast there won't be time to cut anything up after the dish gets going on the stove. The meat should be mixed with cornstarch and sherry and soy sauce (although if one uses chicken, the last ingredient should be left out; in fact, in China, chicken is more expensive than beef or pork so the Chinese cook leaves out the soy sauce since this would alter the color of the chicken and not show it off to advantage to guests). Chen starts stir frying and repeats the ingredients for her dish. There is a cut to a panorama over a lattice-work with the ingredients hanging from it. When the scene cuts back to Chen, she has finished the stir fry and begins to plate it up. She advises that bean sprouts are a great gift for friends and might even be a better offering than flowers. She says she will now sign off as she has to go tend to her bean sprout plantings. The camera follows her to the far right side of the kitchen and the view is now of her back as she works on the sprouts in various pots. In the background is visible the dining room that she accedes to in various other episodes. It is worth noting that this angle on her at the sink, viewed from behind, has not been used in any previous episode.