Meghan Markle is back on our screens – this time with a new cookery and lifestyle show, ‘With Love, Meghan’.
The series, released on Netflix, shares all of her tips from gardening to hosting and, of course, cookery, with the help of her friends and guests.
It’s no surprise that the former Suits star has faced criticism for various reasons, but many individuals are quickly adopting her recipes.
Following the show’s release, Waitrose has experienced an increase in searches for ingredients and recipes showcased in the series, such as edible flowers, assorted fruit platter, bruschetta, and bath salts.
Because of course we didn’t bother with any of those until Meghan came along.
As described on the Netflix website, Meghan’s new series aims to add a touch of joy to daily life and promote embracing playfulness over perfection. This philosophy resonates with many, including myself. But the ultimate test remains: will her recipes truly embody these ideals? Only firsthand experience will reveal the answer…
The recipes vary in terms of how complex they are, so I go for a mix. Focaccia, pasta salad, salt-baked fish, carrot top pesto and a show-stopping honey lemon layer cake with raspberry.
Combined, their ingredients make for a hefty list – most of which I don’t have at home – so off I go to join everyone else in Waitrose hunting for Meghan’s ingredients.
Trolley full, I head back to tackle the recipes and see whether this playful over perfection approach can work and whether her recipes are actually edible, or whether this is all a bit of hype and another cooking show that leaves us wondering why we wasted our time.
Carrot top pesto
I tackle carrot top pesto first because it seems the most straightforward. After all, how hard can pesto be?
I’m not entirely sure whether the carrot top aspect adds much other than having to hunt down some rather expensive organic carrots complete with tops in Waitrose (Duchy – so that’s fitting), but they look very wholesome.
The carrots themselves go in a tray to be roasted with olive oil and seasoning, and I get on with the pesto. Which is fairly non-problematic.
The carrot tops go in a blender, along with pine nuts (which need toasting which is a small pain, but not too onerous), basil, lemon juice, garlic and Parmesan.
It’s a bit vague when it comes to the cheese – the ingredients list says ‘to taste (¼ cup grated is a good place to start)’ while the method says ‘a healthy dose of Parmesan cheese’.
I want to be angry at the lack of specific instruction, but then remember that if it was anyone else I’d probably forgive them for giving me a bit of latitude to make my pesto exactly as I want.
Helpfully, the next step adds some helpful tips on how to get it as I want it: ‘blitz until you have a homogeneous mixture, adding olive oil for more richness, lemon juice for brightness, basil if too thin, and water to thin out as needed’ and I spend the next five minutes enjoying playing around until it’s exactly to my preference.
Just in time for the carrots to be done, and I find myself quite overjoyed by the result, which would make a great side dish for all sorts of meals.
Or you could skip the roasted carrots and use the pesto in all the other ways we use pesto. Okay Meghan, so far so good.
Focaccia
Next up is Focaccia – part of the ‘Love is in the Details’ episode alongside lavender cooling cloths and homemade dog treats (ones for another day methinks). Having made bread a few times but never focaccia, I’m slightly daunted. But if it works out like the carrots, I’ll be happy.
Herein lies one of the simple, but slightly annoying, problems with the recipes I’m using, which is that everything is in ‘cups’ in line with a US audience.
Not much help when you’re a UK-based amateur cook, and given you have to be quite precise when it comes to baking bread, the whole recipe takes a fair bit longer as I convert, then check, double check, and check again.
As anyone who’s made bread knows it’s not actually that complicated, but you’ve just got to get it right in terms of dough and proving time. So I follow the instructions to the letter, mixing flour, instant yeast, water and oil.
Something is clearly not right at the start, then I realise my conversions are indeed wrong and I’ve inadvertently halved the amount of flour, so manage to rectify it.
Once mixed, it gets covered with a towel and left for two hours to rise before being moved to a tin ready for baking, and left to rise again before I do that fun task of dimpling the top and adding olive oil, rosemary and salt and baking.
When the moment of truth comes, I’m overjoyed to find out that it has actually worked.
Perhaps a tiny bit thin and a bit crispy on the edges, but I think this is down to the size of my tin and the heat of my oven.
Nevertheless, it’s pretty tasty, and since we’re adopting Meghan’s mantra of ‘playfulness over perfection’, I’m going to focus on the fact it’s been quite a fun task and doesn’t matter that my bread wouldn’t get me Star Baker on GBBO.
Pasta salad
From the same episode, I opt for pasta salad – with my husband scoffing that surely I don’t need a recipe for such a simple dish. Who knows, I tell him, maybe Meghan’s pasta salad will be a cut above.
Of all the recipes, this is the one where I feel we’re getting all a bit wishy washy and romantic, as I’m instructed to ‘create a bowl of ice cold water’ to shock some of the green veg that gets blanched for it.
Can’t I just fill a bowl with ice cold water?
In the same vein, I’m later instructed to add enough salt to a pan of boiling water for the pasta so it ‘tastes of the sea’.
Can’t we just have an amount?
Overall, it’s a fairly easy process and sounds pretty appealing.
A whole load of wholesome green spring veg, though I ignore the request for ‘English peas, shelled’ and settled for frozen ones.
Because how many of us have easy access to fresh peas and the time to shell them?
There’s Swiss chard too, and the option of kale and zucchini (that’s courgette to you and me), as well as sugar snap peas.
They all get added to pasta along with a vinaigrette, plus various fresh herbs.
Fresh herbs actually seem to be a bit of a theme in some of these recipes – all very lovely and wholesome, but not terribly helpful for the shopping budget, and I already predict that once these recipes are done I’ll find the remaining herbs wilting in the fridge or cupboard in a week or so.
Or perhaps this foray into the world of the Sussexes will see me turn over a new leaf and become someone who garnishes every weekday meal with a sprig of thyme or mint.
The whole lot is combined with the pasta and feta cheese, which I crumble over liberally trying to channel my inner Meghan, without getting cheese all over the kitchen and myself as I do.
The result is a pretty decent pasta salad, and it gets the seal of approval from my husband who begrudgingly admits it’s actually quite good and a bit more upmarket than any of our bog standard pasta salad recipes.
Salt baked fish with roasted tomatoes
According to the website, when Meghan hosts her longtime friends for a lunch of salt-crusted fish, she doesn’t make the dish in advance, because ‘what would be the fun in that?’.
Instead, she ropes her friends in, so they can ‘laugh and delight in the process of creating a delicious meal’.
I’m not sure this will go down too well with my friends and family, so opt to get it ready in advance.
But that’s only after I’ve tackled a slightly problematic ingredients list that sees me head straight to Google to work out what a ‘branzino’ is – turns out that’s another name for sea bass. Hurrah.
Waitrose don’t have any whole sea bass, but I happen to be lucky enough to live near the Great Cornish Food Store, with its own fish counter and some particularly helpful staff.
It’s not good news – apparently there’s a bass ban, which runs from February to March to protect breeding stocks, so I can have any fish except bass.
They advise me that Sea Bream caught that morning will come out the same, so sorry Meghan, but I’m already going off-piste.
While the idea of cooking a whole fish is slightly intimidating, it’s actually a relatively simple recipe.
I create a bed of salt after mixing what feels like a tonne of coarse salt with water, then lay the fish on top – stuffed with olive oil, lemon, and more of those fresh herbs that are now filling up my house.
On top goes more of the salty mix and it goes into the oven to bake, while a sprig of tomatoes on the vine go on a separate tray with lemons, olive oil and seasoning.
In 25 minutes it’s all done, and I’m amazed to see my salt crust has indeed gone crusty, and inside the fish has cooked perfectly.
Cracking the crust and peeling the skin off then removing the fillets isn’t the easiest thing I’ve ever done, but I think that’s down to my dodgy skills and I’m not sure I can hold Meghan Markle responsible for that.
‘Playfulness over perfection’, I mutter, as I arrange the fish on a platter with the tomatoes, lemons and more herbs and I’m delighted to see it pretty much looks like the picture on the website.
Am I becoming a convert, I wonder, as I proudly snap it and glide to the dining table with it in hand.
Honey lemon layer cake with raspberry
The final challenge is an impressive cake from Episode 1, ‘Hello, Honey!’ that features Meghan’s makeup artist and ‘bestie’ Daniel Martin.
From the pictures, the triple-tiered creation stuck together with buttercream is a combination of impressive showstopper and homely creation.
But if I can bake a fish with Meghan’s help, I can do this.
First up is baking the three sponges, which use flour, sugar, eggs, baking powder and olive oil, milk and honey. I’m sceptical, but all three come out brilliantly, and taste pretty good – thanks to the helpful instructions to trim off the ‘mounded top’ and treat them as a snack.
It turns out the baking is the easy part. As is a honey and lemon syrup that each cake gets brushed with before I come to assemble it.
But buttercream is less easy – not because I can’t make buttercream but because my conversion from the pesky ‘cups’ lets me down again and I make enough buttercream for at least three cakes rather than one, with half of it ending up all over the kitchen.
I’m also slightly narked to discover that the original ingredients list fails to mention the raspberry preserve that I need to add between my layers, or the fresh raspberries to decorate the top.
The idea is that the buttercream and raspberry will be piped in different spirals in between the layers, making for a lovely cross section when you cut a slice.
But given I’ve had to resort to a bit of raspberry jam at the back of the fridge and eek it out enough to make a layer, piping it is out.
The same goes for the buttercream when I realise that my makeshift food bag piping bag isn’t quite up to the job – the recipe recommended a Ziplock bag, but I’m not even sure that would work, and running low on patience I opt to ditch the spiral idea and just spread the buttercream on with a spatula.
After all, playfulness rather than perfection, remember. The finished article is actually pretty good – and while my styling and decoration may not be by the book, the cake itself tastes great. Another win.
As someone who embarked on this mission hoping the recipes would fail, or I’d hate them, I have to concede that they’re actually all bang on.
A bit vague in places, a bit wishy washy in description, but technically they all work.
Are they groundbreaking and innovative? No. But Meghan wouldn’t be the first celeb to start sharing recipes that we’ve all seen plenty of times before.
And while I’m a fan of championing enjoyment in the kitchen over ‘perfection’, the irony of someone in her position sitting in California reminding us of this doesn’t escape me.
So thanks Meghan, it’s been fun. But I’m not sure I’ll be racing back to try the other recipes.
With Love, Ellen.
