Auntie Fong Cooks · Takeout at Home
The rest bought rent, wages, the carton, the app's commission, and the driver. None of it bought better noodles. The noodles were the same noodles.
I am Auntie Fong. This is the receipt that opens the book: the fifty takeout dishes people actually order, the five things a restaurant cook does before the food touches the pan that you were never shown, and the real cost of every plate printed beside the takeout price. No wok. One heavy 12-inch skillet on the stove you already have.
Typical 2026 prices; yours will differ.
One PDF book, two bonus PDFs. $29 once, plus sales tax where your state charges it. No subscription.
One book · Two bonus PDFs · 60 dishes · 72 numbered fixes
Who is talking
In my family, everyone cooked, and everyone had a rule. The rice had to be dry. The oil had to be smoking before anything went in. The sauce got made on Sunday and used all week. Nobody wrote it down; you just learned it standing next to someone at the stove. That is where this book comes from: family habit, and a great many plates cooked on an ordinary home burner, in a 12-inch skillet, until the method held and the numbers were written down. I have never run a restaurant and I will not pretend I did. Trust the recipe, not a résumé.
If you found me through the chow mein video, this is everything the videos do not have room for, in one place.
$29 once. No subscription. PDF, yours to keep.
What the money bought
You are not comparing your noodles to their noodles. You are comparing your noodles to their noodles plus everything on the receipt that is not noodles.
Once you see what the restaurant has, you stop blaming yourself for the difference and start closing it. The $27.09 bought a burner you cannot buy, a cook who prepped for a hundred plates before yours, the carton, the app's commission, and the driver. The $3.40 bought noodles, chicken thigh, cabbage, and soy sauce: the same noodles, the same chicken, the same cabbage, and, if you buy the better bottle, better soy sauce than theirs. So the difference is not the groceries and it is not talent. It is five things a restaurant cook does before the food touches the pan, and nobody told you.
Typical 2026 prices; yours will differ.
The $27.09 bought
The $3.40 bought
Difference in the noodles: none.
| What you blamed | What it actually was | Fixes |
|---|---|---|
| The pan | The pan was not hot enough | 1 to 10 |
| The rice | Fresh wet rice, undried noodles | 11 to 26 |
| The meat | Breast, not velveted | 27 to 38 |
| The sauce | Five bottles poured in one at a time | 39 to 48 |
| Your hands | Garlic first, everything at once | 49 to 66 |
Ninety seconds
Why yours does not taste the same has nothing to do with talent and almost nothing to do with equipment. It comes down to five things a restaurant cook does before the food ever touches the pan. Each one has a cue you can see or hear, and a fix number in Part 2. My mother's phrase was "do not make me wait," and she meant the pan.
The cue The smoke is not a warning. It is the starting gun. Fix 2
The cue You can see pan between the pieces. Fix 3
The cue The slices look glossy and slightly translucent, and they slide against each other. Fixes 29, 31
The cue Rice grains fall apart when you rub a clump between your fingers; noodles do not stick to each other when you lift them. Fixes 13, 21
The cue It bubbles the moment it hits the pan and coats the back of a spoon within ten seconds. Fixes 39, 64
The receipt, line by line
This is the receipt from the first page of the book. One order of chicken chow mein, $14.50 on the menu, and then the lines that arrive after you have already decided: the delivery fee, the service fee, the tip, the tax. $27.09 at the door. The groceries in the same plate, in 2026, come to about $3.40.
Every one of the fifty dishes in Part 4 gets its own version of this at the top of the recipe: takeout menu price, delivered price with fees and tip, cost to make four servings, cost per plate.
You paid$27.09
You ateabout $3.40of noodles, chicken, cabbage, and sauce
Typical 2026 prices; yours will differ.
What the receipt saidAmount
Chicken chow mein, menu price14.50
Delivery fee3.99
Service fee2.90
Tip4.68
Tax1.02
Total paid27.09
The groceries in the same plate, 20263.40
Reconstructed from typical 2026 delivery-app fees; no restaurant or app is named. Worked in full in Part 1 of the book. Typical 2026 prices; yours will differ. The budget page has a column for your own.
The numbers
Every recipe carries four prices at the top, before the ingredients. I put them there so you can catch me.
Crab rangoon is about $0.30 each at home; the box of six is $11.50 delivered. Egg drop soup is about $0.40 a plate. Honey walnut shrimp, the most expensive dish in this table, is about $2.30 a plate at home against $27.50 at the door. I am not asking you to believe me. Look at your last receipt, then this table, then write your own numbers in the column the book leaves for them.
Typical 2026 prices; yours will differ.
| Dish | Menu | Deliveredwith fees and tip | At homeper plate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chicken chow mein | 12.00 | 18.50 | 0.85 |
| Egg fried rice | 9.00a quart | 14.00 | 0.55 |
| Chicken fried rice | 11.00a quart | 17.00 | 1.10 |
| General Tso's chicken | 14.00 | 21.50 | 1.45 |
| Chicken with broccoli | 12.00 | 18.50 | 1.15 |
| Beef and broccoli | 14.00 | 21.50 | 2.05 |
| Mapo tofu | 13.00 | 20.00 | 1.05 |
| Egg drop soup | 5.00a pint | 8.00 | 0.40 |
| Crab rangoon | 7.50for six | 11.50 | 0.30each |
| Honey walnut shrimp | 18.00 | 27.50 | 2.30 |
Your stove is not my stove
You have been cooking it with the wrong rice, the wrong heat, the wrong order, and no one ever told you.
The receipt did not have a line for talent. What it paid for was a cook who velveted the chicken before service, cooked the rice yesterday, dried the noodles on a tray, mixed the sauce in a cup, and then let the pan get hotter than you have ever let yours. Those are decisions, not gifts, and the book gives you seventy two of them by number so that every recipe can point to the ones it needs.
The velvet alone, a baking soda step explained once and used fifty times, is why supermarket chicken thigh and flank steak come out of a restaurant tender and out of your kitchen tough. And when a plate still comes out wrong, every recipe ends with "If yours looks wrong": three or four things with a one-line fix each, and the back of the book has a rescue index of 35 problems sorted by what you see: mushy, gummy, tough, watery, cloudy, bitter, grey.
What you get
PDF, 7 x 9.5 inches, 64 photographs, 5 illustrated diagrams. Plus two bonus PDFs, below. Sixty dishes in all.
Every dish is three pages: a full-page photograph, then the recipe across two, in the same format every time, so by the tenth dish you stop reading and start cooking. Serves, time, and the fix numbers it depends on. The four prices. You need, with the velveting and blanching already written into the ingredient line. The method, written by cue: leave it a full minute, you will hear it crackle. Then "If yours looks wrong."
Before you cook anything
How a cue-based recipe reads, where the numbers come from, the food-safety temperatures, and the one habit that is half the book.
Part 1 · The receipt
Three chapters: the $27.09 chow mein itemized; what you are really paying for; the five things nobody told you.
Part 2 · The fixes
72 numbered fixes in eight chapters: heat without a wok (1 to 10), rice (11 to 18), noodles (19 to 26), protein (27 to 38), sauce (39 to 48), aromatics and vegetables (49 to 58), the order of cooking (59 to 66), serving and storing (67 to 72). Five diagrams.
Part 3 · The pantry
The twenty ingredients behind all fifty dishes, each with a named example and the store brand, the 2026 cost, and how long it lasts. Priced protein and vegetable tables. The four sauces in a Sunday jar. First trip about $70 to $90, then $15 to $25 a month. Typical 2026 prices; yours will differ.
Part 4 · The fifty dishes
Fried rice 6, noodles 7, chicken 10, beef 6, pork 5, shrimp 5, tofu and vegetables 5, soups 3, sides 3.
Part 5 · The week
One trip, five dinners for four. The Sunday hour. The shopping list, priced by section. The budget page.
Back matter
The rescue index: 35 problems by what they look like. 26 substitutions. The fridge card. Index by dish and by ingredient.
And two bonuses, included
Both come in the same download. I do not sell them on their own, so I will not put a made-up price on them and cross it out. You will know what they are worth after the first chow mein.
Bonus 1 · Included
The pages you will actually use with wet hands, one to a sheet in large type: the fridge card; the velvet; brown sauce, sweet and sour, General Tso's base, kung pao (single batch and Sunday jar); rice and noodles; three rescue cards by symptom; substitutions; the pantry shelf with 2026 prices and a tick column; the week's shopping list with a Mine column; the budget page; a cook's log.
Bonus 2 · Included
Takeout favorites that did not fit in the fifty, in the same three-page format with the same four prices at the top: beef with string beans, chicken with black bean sauce, chicken egg foo young, boneless spareribs, bourbon chicken, Hunan beef, cold sesame noodles, salt and pepper tofu, shrimp with garlic sauce, crispy orange beef.
Typical 2026 prices; yours will differ.
One grocery trip · One Sunday hour · Five weeknight dinners for four
Run it on your own prices before you believe mine. I will not multiply this by fifty two weeks for you, because you do not order five dinners every week and I do not know your prices. A book that promises you a yearly figure is guessing.
You get home at six with nothing ready. The rice is cooked fresh and wet, the chicken is breast and dry, the sauce goes in as five separate bottles, the pan never gets hot enough, and by Wednesday the app is open.
The book gives you one week instead, Monday to Friday for four people: chicken with broccoli, pork fried rice, wonton soup, beef lo mein, General Tso's. About $42 of groceries from one trip, about $2.10 a plate, against roughly $175 for the same five dinners delivered to feed four. Most stir-fries take 25 to 35 minutes from the first cut; do the Sunday hour and weeknight dinners come in under 30. The crispy fried chickens take 45, and I will not pretend otherwise. Fill in the shopping list and the budget page from your own store and your own last receipt; that is the only arithmetic I trust.
The week, from the book
Groceries for the five dinnersabout 42
Per plate, twenty platesabout 2.10
The same five dinners, deliveredabout 175
The pantry
First tripabout 70 to 90
Keeping it stocked15 to 25 a month
Typical 2026 prices; yours will differ.
Mon chicken with broccoli · Tue pork fried rice · Wed wonton soup · Thu beef lo mein · Fri General Tso's
The book
The chow mein on the receipt was $27.09. The book is $29. Typical 2026 prices; yours will differ.
$29once
One payment. No subscription. Three PDFs, readable on phone, tablet, and computer, formatted to print at home. Nothing is added at checkout; the two bonus files come with the book. Sales tax is added at checkout where your state charges it on e-books.
You are not bad at cooking Chinese food. You were missing five things and a few numbers. They are all in here.
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Thirty days, no argument. If the book is not for you, email support@auntiefongcooks.com within 30 days of your purchase from the address you bought with, and you get the full $29 back to the card you paid with. I send the refund within two business days of your email; your bank may take five to ten more to show it. You do not have to send anything back. You cannot un-download a PDF, so keep the files; that is my choice, not a loophole, so use it honestly. One refund per person. After a refund, your download link stops working and no future updates go to that address.
If the link is broken or the email never came, write to me first, before you dispute the charge: I can usually fix that the same day, and a card dispute takes weeks and helps no one. Already ordered and nothing arrived? Check your spam folder for an email from Gumroad, then write to the same address with the email you used at checkout. No fees, no store credit, no questions beyond your order email. The charge on your statement will show Gumroad (usually beginning "gumrd.com"). Gumroad, Inc. is the merchant of record.
On the checkout page
The receipt at the top of this page had four lines after the food. Mine has one. There is no "buy together" box, no timer, no small order fee, and nothing that turns $29 into something else on the next screen. The Kitchen Cards and Ten More Dishes are already in the download. I would rather you print the fridge card than buy a second thing from me. If I ever make something else worth selling, it will be on this page with its own price, not hiding behind the pay button.
Auntie Fong Cooks: Takeout at Home (3 PDFs)29.00Total29.00plus sales tax where it applies
How it works
The checkout page is run by Gumroad; it takes your card, Apple Pay, or Google Pay and an email address for the download. Your card goes to Gumroad, not to me.
Three PDFs. The main book is about 14 MB.
It comes from Gumroad, so you can open the book on your phone in the store and print the cards at home. Check spam if it has not arrived in a few minutes.
No account to create. No subscription. Nothing recurring.
Questions
No. The whole book assumes a heavy 12-inch skillet on a home stove. There is a dedicated section for electric coils and glass tops.
Most of the twenty pantry ingredients are at any supermarket. Five are easier at an Asian grocer or online: dark soy sauce, Shaoxing wine, Chinkiang black vinegar, fresh egg noodles, rice noodles. The book gives a substitute for each.
It is the Chinese-American takeout menu, made the way the restaurant makes it, at home. The book says so on the first page. It is not a book of regional Chinese cooking. Four Sichuan dishes are included: mapo tofu, dan dan noodles, twice cooked pork, dry fried green beans.
Most stir-fries are 25 to 35 minutes from the first cut. Soups 10 to 25. The crispy fried chickens 45. Do the Sunday hour and weeknight dinners come in under 30.
The book shows typical 2026 menu prices, delivered prices with fees and tip, and grocery costs per plate, and it says plainly that prices vary by location and that you should write in your own. The budget page is built for that. Typical 2026 prices; yours will differ.
The safety temperatures in the book are the USDA and FDA numbers, stated in the front matter, on the fridge card, and in the protein fixes: 165°F for chicken, 145°F for pork and beef with a rest, cooked rice refrigerated within two hours and used within four days. USDA and FDA did not review or endorse this book.
No. One payment of $29 and it is finished. If I correct or add to this edition, you get the new file at no charge, sent to the email you bought with, for as long as this book is on sale. The files are yours to keep: download them and back them up. Your download link stays live for as long as this book is on sale, and I will not tell you "forever", because nobody can honestly promise you forever.
Restaurants are not the enemy; I go to mine every other Sunday and I tip well. But once the technique is right, homemade is not a downgrade. It is the same dish, minus everything that is not the dish.
Heat, batch, the velvet, dry starch, and a sauce mixed before the pan is hot. Do not make the pan wait.
$29 once · PDF, instant download · 30-day refund, keep the files