Don’t forget to elevate: What we learned from Meghan, With Love.
Meghan Markle’s new Netflix series With Love, Meghan is finally here (I know she’s called the Duchess of Sussex now, but, like X will always be Twitter, Meghan will always be Markle to me. Sorry, Meghan).
As a casual follower of The Tig, Meghan’s lifestyle brand, back in the day (I liked the posts in my Insta feed and took on approximately none of the advice), I felt a little sad when she had to shut it down to go off and be a princess. So I was low-key thrilled when I learned she’d be returning to her roots in With Love, Meghan, especially since I now have more in common with Meghan than ever. Like Meghan, I’m the mother of two small children and some dogs, and I’m also married to a bearded man who is not a prince (is Prince Harry still a prince? Whatever, you get the idea).
After bingeing it all in one sitting, here are my main takeaways from With Love, Meghan:
Keep it simple … kind of
I was surprised by how achievable many of the recipes seemed. A couple of them were even “one-pot” style, where you can just chuck everything in and be done with it. And sure, Meghan’s “one pot” is a Le Creuset while mine is an Anko, but I could totally see myself making the tomato pasta dish she cooks in the first episode, even as she’s careful to clarify that her children aren’t eating “heaps of noodles” while my own sat in front of the TV at that very moment eating literal piles of pasta with melted cheese. Whoops.
Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, finesses a sponge cake with her make-up artist, Daniel Martin, in With Love, Meghan.
Find a friend
Central to the conceit of With Love, Meghan is Meghan inviting guests into her pretend home (the show doesn’t use her real one). While I am filled with a cold sense of dread at the very idea of hosting anyone in my home, I did appreciate Meghan’s emphasis on doing things together. Also, I learned that if you have a friend who is worse than you in the kitchen, it makes you look extra great (although I related a little too much to the worst friend every time – like Meghan’s first guest, makeup artist Daniel, who cuts his finger approximately 10 seconds into the process). On the flip side, if you have a friend who is better than you in the kitchen, they will make you incredible food.
Looks matter
Meghan’s whole thing is to “elevate” – basically, make everything look pretty. She’s into turning every meal or occasion into a “moment” or, as Meghan puts it, a “story”. She also likes to create “worlds”, which also just means arranging things prettily, as far as I can tell. I don’t know that I have the gene that is required to achieve her high skill level of presentation (my chicken-scratch handwriting, for instance, is about as far from her elegant calligraphy as you can get), but I could probably do the cute fruit rainbow she says she makes for her kids.
