Actress Ming-Na Wen, a Mt. Lebanon High School and Carnegie Mellon University grad, wasn’t sure she could or should write a cookbook, even though fans showed interest in her writing one.

“I would post photos of me on Instagram with the meals I’ve made, and they all wanted a recipe,” Wen recalled in a Zoom interview late last month. “I’m like, we don’t have recipes; we just cook, you know.”

Beyond that, Wen, who grew up around and later worked in her parents’ Chinatown Inn in Downtown Pittsburgh, didn’t feel qualified to write a cookbook.

“People with cookbooks have to have legitimate credentials,” she recalled thinking. “I’m not a real chef.”

Then her literary agent told her many celebrities publish cookbooks and they don’t actually cook.

“To me, that is such a crime,” Wen said. “Not naming names, but it blew my mind. Growing up in Pittsburgh, you have to be authentic. You need to be honest and forthright. At that point, I was like, OK, then I definitely have the credentials.”

Three years later, Wen’s “Have You Eaten Yet? Family Recipes from a Restaurant Daughter” ($35, Simon Element) arrives in bookstores Oct. 6.

“Have You Eaten Yet?” includes a mix of recipes, from Chinese dishes like those served at Chinatown Inn (egg rolls, wonton soup) to American classics (chicken parmesan, pesto salmon). Wen wanted her cookbook to reflect her own journey as an Asian American.

“I didn’t want it to be specifically just a Chinese cookbook,” Wen said. “I wanted it to be the true Asian American experience, so there are a lot of other wonderful dishes in there. I would try something (at a restaurant) and love it and recreate it in my own kitchen to serve to my family. There’s a lot of love in the cookbook.”

And a lot of personal history, too.

Before she gets to the recipes, “Have You Eaten Yet?” includes around 30 pages of autobiography, details of Wen’s life experiences, from her birth in Macau, a Portuguese colony at the time, to a move to Hong Kong, her parents’ divorce and her mother’s new relationship with an American, Soo Lim Yee, who would become Wen’s stepfather on paper but whom she related to as her father (“Baba,” dad in Chinese) in her head and in her heart.

Wen describes her initial reaction at age 7 when her mother woke her and told her she was moving to New York City in the United States. Attending a Catholic school, Wen’s only frame of reference for foreign lands was through Bible stories.

“I don’t want to live in the desert!” Wen cried.

After three years in New York, the family moved to Pittsburgh, initially living above Yee’s Chinatown Inn before settling in Mt. Lebanon during her middle school years, which she describes as “a tough transition.”

While the recipe portion of the book presented its own challenges, so did the autobiographical elements.

“The Chinese, we’re raised to keep your private stories to yourselves,” Wen said. “For me to open up a little bit more in this cookbook was a departure from my upbringing, to the point where my mother didn’t want her name in the book. I was like, ‘Mom, I’m not gonna reveal all these scandalous stories about our family,’ not that we have many, but it’s that level of privacy. We associate our dignity and our self-preservation and worth in that privacy. We take it seriously. So even telling small stories — about my feelings, having a stepfather growing up — is sort of taboo.”

In addition to her background as a “restaurant daughter,” Wen made a conscious choice in her acting career to take Los Angeles-based series regular roles so she could be home for dinner with her husband, Eric, and two children (now almost 21 and 26) as much as possible. (Only “Stargate: Universe” took her outside of Southern California for two seasons to film in Vancouver, Canada.)

“When I started on ‘ER,’ it was such a well-oiled machine that a lot of times I’d have the morning shift and we’d block shoot all our scenes, and then I’m home by 3 or 4 in the afternoon,” Wen said. “For me, food is not just nourishment; it’s really a time to be able to bond and share stories and create memories with your family and your friends, so that was very important to me to maintain.”

That same perspective also helped inform the book’s title.

“I’ve really been into C-dramas recently,” Wen said, referring to Chinese dramas available on streaming services. “Every moment that people get together or meet up, the very first question they ask is, ‘Have you eaten yet?’ I realized, my mother did that. [Parents in China] don’t say, ‘I love you’ a lot. I do — I smother my children with hugs and ‘love yous’ — but growing up, if I had friends come over, my mom wouldn’t even bother asking what their names were. She would just ask, ‘Have you eaten yet?’ That was her way of welcoming them into the home and showing that she cares. That’s the love language I grew up with.”

Wen said she initially found it daunting to come up with the 65 to 70 recipes her publisher requested, but once she started writing them up, the greater challenge was narrowing the recipes down to 70.

“It was literally recreating every recipe that’s in the book,” Wen said of her research process. “I measured and remeasured. I had a ghostwriter to help me shape everything, but she was really just the taste tester that would take my recipe and make sure that it was all good because every so often I’d put, like, ‘two tablespoons of salt,’ and she’d say, ‘Ming, do you mean two teaspoons of salt?’ I’d be like, ‘Yes, yes, yes. It’s only two teaspoons.’ She was able to help guide me, but everything that’s in that book is love, sweat and tears.”

That proved especially true of recreating Chinatown Inn recipes.

“They cook in huge batches,” Wen said, “I would ask my brother or my mom, ‘What’s in the egg rolls?’ They’re like, ‘Well, it’s this and this and this and this and this.’ I’m like, ‘Well, how much of it?’ and they’re like, ‘We don’t know.’

In addition to promoting her cookbook on a multi-city book tour and posting videos to her cookbook’s YouTube channel, Wen plays the Greek goddess Hera in the third season of Disney Channel’s “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” (Nov. 20), but there are currently no “Star Wars” projects in the works that would bring back Wen’s Fennec Shand, seen in “The Mandalorian” and “The Book of Boba Fett.”

“I will keep haunting (Mt. Lebanon native and Lucasfilm co-president) Dave Filoni until he brings a very beloved character back that he helped to create,” Wen said, laughing.

Despite a 2024 report that a sequel to Wen’s 1993 film “The Joy Luck Club” was in development, it sounds like those efforts stalled.

“As of now, no (plans),” Wen said. “Anything and everything is possible, and there’s always room for development, but I think the ladies and I — my wonderful co-stars Tamlyn Tomita, Lauren Tom and, of course, Rosalind Chao — we really want to honor Amy Tan’s book with all the nuances and all the importance that that film represented for Asian Americans and for the immigrant story of these characters. Unless something just as wonderful is presented, we just don’t want to tarnish the legacy of that film. We’re not easy sellouts!”

Wen recently appeared at the Toronto International Film Festival in support of the indie movie “Whatcha Want,” directed by Mina Shum and starring Isabell Wei (“Bridgerton”).

“I’m interested in doing some of these indie films,” Wen said. “That’s an area that I haven’t really focused on. At this stage in my career, it’s nice to support a lot of the younger Asian American or just Asian artists out there. There are so many of them – directors, producers — and it’s an exciting new arena I’m getting into.”

Wen will be in Pittsburgh for a conversation about her book, moderated by author/corporate consultant Jim Rooney, son of the late Steelers owner Dan Rooney, at 7 p.m. Oct. 8 at Third Presbyterian Church, 5701 Fifth Ave., in Shadyside. (Details and ticket options, which can include a copy of the cookbook, are available at simonandschuster.com/p/have-you-eaten-yet-tour.)