It's tough to do a stir-fry like they do it in restaurants at home. Home stoves just don't put out the heat that a restaurant stove does, so a home stir-fry will always be a little different.
BUT! Different is still delicious.
Here's how I do it:
- Chop vegetables evenly for even cooking and consider how long each will cook. Cut carrots and broccoli stalks, hard items which take longer to cook through, into smaller or thinner pieces. Meat, if you're using any, should be in really thin strips (I like mine with a marinade of soy sauce, sesame oil, and a teeny bit of five-spice powder).
- Once you've chopped everything, heat a small amount of peanut or other high-smoke-point oil in your wok. There should be enough oil to leave a sheen of it about halfway up the wok. Some people leave a little puddle in the bowl of the wok, but with a well-seasoned wok, I don't find the pool of oil necessary. Drop a clove of garlic in there and rub it around to season the oil. Fish it out before cooking the meal.
- Once everything is HOT--as hot as you can get it on a home stove--add your meat (if any) to the center of the wok. Try to leave it alone for a couple of minutes to get a little sear on it before stirring. Then move it to the side after a couple more minutes of cooking. You don't need to take it out of the wok, just nudge it up the side a little.
- Add your other ingredients in reverse order of how quickly they cook. Slowest cookers like carrots go first so they have the most wok time. Stuff like sprouts and pea pods go in last. The beauty of this is that you get to decide what you like cooked firm and what you prefer to be softer, so you can tailor your stir-fry.
- If you're doing any kind of sauce aside from the residual flavorings on your meat/vegetables, move everything off to the side of the wok in a ring around a clear center which should have some liquid cooked off from the veggies in it. Add a little bit of cornstarch (a pinch or two, it's effective stuff and you don't need much) and stir it into the little puddle. Then bring all the other ingredients back to the center and mix everything thoroughly. You can skip this step if you're not into a thickened sauce; I often do and it still tastes delicious.
- Eat it up!
There are a lot of finer points like marinade ingredients, spices, and other flavoring agents that I skipped over because they're so much a matter of taste. Some people like shrimp paste and sriracha, other people like Tabasco and worcestershire sauce, other people like lemongrass and a couple of star anise pods...you know what you like better than we do, so play around with some of the possibilities. It's hard to go wrong.
I hope this helps!