Can you offer any tips that will make my cooking taste like it's from a Chinese restaurant / take away?!

A few things to keep in mind...

-Try to make the food from "scratch" (fresh) as much as possible. Prepackaged Chinese Dinner kits in frozen food sections or off the shelf are never very good.

-Try to use the most authentic Chinese ingredients that you can find if at all possible. If you have a Chinese grocery store to work with then all the better. Examples: Using Xaoshing Rice wine tastes different than using just a regular table variety white whine. Whole fermented black beans & freshly chopped garlic yield more flavor than premade Black Bean Garlic Sauce.

-When you are finishing making a stirfry dish either in a wok or in a frying pan...try to add a few drops of toasted sesame oil at the very end. Never at the beginning of the dish.

I'm a personal chef.

My husband now is not chinese, so when I cook chinese food for him I have to "americanize" the tastes as he is used to the chinese restaurants here, not real true authentic chinese food (which I miss dearly...but at least I have him hooked on some real things).

He likes this one dish specifically that is chicken and broccoli. I take about two cloves of garlic and add them to a few tbl of hot oil and fry until fragarant. Then I will add the chicken and cook until tender (all chinese cooking is done on very high heat, so the meat stays soft). I season it with salt and add my chopped broccoli. I add also maybe two tbl of chopped green onion (the green part). I'll add a little water and make sure that everything is coated with the garlic/salt oil/water mix. Add 1tsp cornstarch to thicken the liquid to make it saucy.

For a sweeter dish, like the brown sauce can be sometimes. It is made with soya, water (same parts water as the soya sauce), sugar (usually 1 or 2 tsp), salt, and cornstarch. I generally dislike the brown sauce but if I make it at home I'll add crushed red pepper (from the chinese store, not from the american one) and a dash of chinese black vinegar also. You should add the msg as it brings out the flavors alot of the different ingredients and can give every dish a completely different taste in the end.

use a restaurant grade wok (available at most restaurant supply companies)
and use a extremely high heat source, either gas grill, oven or external burner

get the wok blazingly hot before adding anything
the food should be cooked extremley fast, which helps give it that nice flavor and texture you get from asian restaurants

you can also get some really fun sauces at asian markets that give the food real good tastes.

There is no such thing as "authentic" Chinese food.
Or would you really say that a housewife's version, passed down from her gran, in regards to a shepherds pie is less authentic that the one you get in a posh restaurant?
What is True Chinese cooking. The flavour you get in a street market in Bejing..the flavour a Chinese peasant woman cooks on the roadside for her child? The Royal Chinese dishes? Chinese restaurants in the UK or in France? Which one..the posh or your Chinese vendor in your little village? The one who has a modern décor or the one who has the Sixties décor?
Most Chinese restaurants outside China are not even run by Chinese.
You can buy zillions of cookery books..you can buy all the gadgets, all the ingredients...you will never capture true authentic taste of a dish. You cant..because it does not exist.

I'm going to be honest with you, I have been studying Chinese cuisine for over 15 years.

Even the chinese when they cook at home can not replicate the taste of the resaurant because of one thing. That's what the chinese refer to as "the breath of the wok".

That's the flavor obtained when the hot cast iron or steel wok heats up very very high under a pit stove or chinese stove containing temperatures that you can never replicate at home on an american stove. A dish can be made in 1/3 the time of at home. This gives an incredible flavor and better texture of ingredients that can not be duplicated. This gives that slightly smokey taste to the Lo Mein and the sticky crispy firm exterior to the Generol Tso chicken.

Chinese food is one of the most complicated cuisines in the world. People act like it's the easiest but trust me it's not. That's why hardly anyones chinese food at home can taste like the restaurant. I takes many techniques and skills to master this, even cutting the ingredients too small will change the taste and outcome.

I can honestly say that my Chinese food tastes like the restaurant because I've studied and trained for years.

If you want to know more or how to prepare a specific dish, feel free to E-mail me and I'll let you in on the know. The chinese have guarded their secrets for many years, hardly any non-chinese know them each restauarant has their own secrets. I've know people who worked in Chinese restaurants preparing the dishes and didn't know how to cook them because the owners only told them just enough info. LOL. True story.

Adding monosodium glutamate might do the trick (flavor enhancer at the grocery store, here it's sold in a little brown bottle). A couple of drop of oyster or fish sauce always seems to bring out the chinese twist as well.

in addition to other answers use sesame oil which you can heat to a much higher temperature and adding chinese 5 spice can help with the flavouring