The first image is of Chinese wind chimes. A title indicates "Joyce Chen Cooks" and then "Egg Foo Yung." A subsequent title gives us Chinese lettering and the translation "How are you?" To the right of the chimes we see Chen and the camera, without any cutting, moves in on her at the kitchen counter. Chen welcomes the viewer, explains that the Chinese words offer the "How are you?" salutation, and declares that her goal is to "encourage you to do more cooking." Today, she explains, she will show how to make Egg Foo Yung that is comparable to restaurant-style fare but that can be done easily at home. First, she will make the sauce. As she pours the first ingredient, chicken broth, into a pot, we get the very first cut in the episode -- to a close-up of her hands doing the pouring -- and the episode will now regularly alternate long shots of Chen explaining the process and close-ups of her hands doing this or that specific task in preparation of the recipe. One ingredient she singles out in her Egg Foo Yong sauce is ketchup, which she admits is not a "native Chinese ingredient" but which fits the Western palate and its penchant for sweetness in savory dishes (she notes that ketchup is particularly useful in adding color and flavor to sweet-and-sour Chinese dishes). After finishing the sauce, Chen repeats the ingredients out loud. She shows off the sauce in close-up and explains that it looks very much "like the gravy you are served with your roasted turkey or roasted beef." Here, then, we witness -- as we often will in Chen's series -- a desire to make seemingly exotic Chinese cuisine familiar to U.S. audiences by comparing the foreign element to ostensibly comparable American fare. Chen now announces she will make the Egg Foo Yung itself and the camera follows her as she moves to another part of her kitchen to do so. The preparation for Egg Foo Yung, as she explains it, starts with five eggs unbeaten, and she notes that eggs are an easy, inexpensive, and nutritious ingredient: in this respect, again, her preparation of a somewhat foreign dish invests in the values common in postwar American cooking instruction where there was often an emphasis on health and economy along with the need to impress family and guests through fare that seemed a bit exotic, yet not too much so. Chen explains that in China, at the birth of a new child, eggs are dyed red and sent out as a sort of birth announcement: the quantity of eggs will indicate the degree of wealth in the family and the evenness or oddness of the number of eggs indicates whether the newborn is a boy or a girl. The color red indicates good luck and, in general, eggs are a harbinger of good things to come, so Egg Foo Yung is a symbolically resonant dish. One ingredient to be added to the mixture is bean sprouts and Chen shows off fully grown sprouts as well as seeds, promising in a future episode to show viewers how to grow their own sprouts. Once again showing concern for American tastes and for accessibility of ingredients in the U.S. market, Chen explains that for sprouts one can substitute lettuce chopped in strips to approximate the shape of sprouts. She adds in other ingredients such as salt -- which she spells out letter by letter -- and MSG and sherry. Notably, these ingredients are in containers labeled with the generic name (i.e., just "SHERRY" or "MSG") and no brand names visible. Here, Chen's show continues the practice of Julia Child's The French Chef, which, as a program on public television, worked to eschew any sense of product placement or promotion. Once she has finished mixing the Egg Foo Yung, Chen announces that she will repeat the ingredients and holds up a list in Chinese characters. A dissolve takes us to a closer shot of Chinese figurines (wise men, it would seem), each of which has a small label with an ingredient on it. The camera pans over these to sum up all the ingredients that we have just seen combined to make up the batter. Chen puts the batter into oil on an electric griddle pan, and while the mixture cooks, she offers some background to Chinese cooking history. In particular, the difficulty of transportation across regions meant that Chinese cooking tended to stay local and developed thereby into four primary regional schools: Mandarin or Peking, Shanghai, Cantonese, and Szechuan. Chen promises to offer more detailed instruction on the various cuisine in upcoming episodes of her show. Chen now plates up the cooked dish and declares how good it smells. "I hope some day you will come here to eat with us," she offers. She puts the Egg Fu Yung and its sauce on a tray which she carries across the threshold of the kitchen into a somewhat abstracted dining space: an octagonal table with modernist chairs surrounded by lattice work and no visible walls. Rice is already on the table and she dishes out portions of the Egg Fu Yung. (Unlike in Child's The French Chef, she does no tasting of her dish and doesn't mime the presence of the viewer as a diner at her table.) She promises to "See you again" and the words for that appear in Chinese and English. The camera pans to the wind chimes that we saw at the very beginning and the credits come on the screen one after the other. A voiceover tells us that Chen is also the author of the published volume, The Joyce Chen Cookbook.