Meghan Markle Netflix show: Everything we learned from With Love, Meghan

Meghan, Duchess of Sussex is sharing a whole new side of herself with the launch of her new lifestyle band As Ever and, of course, her new Netflix show, With Love, Meghan.

The series follows Meghan and her celebrity guests, such as actress Mindy Kaling and celebrity chef Roy Choi, learning tips from the actress-turned-royal alongside viewers.

What is With Love, Meghan about?

The show blends “practical how-tos and candid conversation with friends, new and old” as the actress-turned-royal and her guests roll up their sleeves in the kitchen and the garden – “and beyond”.

The duchess shared “personal tips and tricks” to “create beauty, even in the unexpected”.

The lifestyle series features eight episodes, all a bite-sized 33 minutes each.

The show premiered on March 4, having been delayed due to the wildfires devastating Los Angeles in January, when it was meant to go live.

What have we learned from Meghan’s show?

Even before the premiere of the show, we learned a top tip from the Duchess of Sussex.

The Office star Mindy Kaling, appeared on the show, shared one of the most important tricks she learned from the 43-year-old.

In an interview with Time, the TV producer provided an inside scoop about the royal and her show, with their episode covering the ins and outs of throwing children’s parties.

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Inside the private life Harry and Meghan gave up royalty for

“I love cooking, but I’m really not good at entertaining,” Kaling shared, “I don’t know anything about how you’re not supposed to use overhead lighting when people come over. You’re supposed to use little lamps.

“But Meghan just knows how to do that stuff. For kids’ parties I usually just go to the party supply store and get paper things, which I don’t judge and neither does she. But it was fun to learn simple ways to do a homemade kids’ party.”

Kaling first met Meghan when she was at home during maternity leave after welcoming her third child. The royal had texted the 45-year-old to ask if she wanted to come over and share a meal at her and Prince Harry’s Montecito, California, home.

“I think a misconception about Meghan is that she’s in any way fussy or has expectations of fanciness. She really is a down-to-earth person who knows a lot of fun tricks to make entertaining and cooking easier.”

Now that the show has gone live, we have even more access to the Duchess of Sussex’s tips.

Meghan makes bath salts for her guests

Preparing for houseguests seems almost like a ritual for Meghan and she shares her tips for how to best welcome them into your home.

You must think about what’s at the side of the bed for them and what’s in the bathroom for them, she says, explaining how to be a thoughtful hostess.

In that vein, she prepares a tray full of gifts for Daniel Martin – her close friend and longtime makeup artist – who is the guest in the first episode of the series.

She makes her own bath salts from a mixture of Epsom salts, arnica oil, lavender, pink salt and leaves a gap at the top of the jar for a “teabag” containing rosebuds and dried lavender. That way, the dried plants won’t get stuck in the drain. “You don’t want to have to clean this out of your bathtub after you’ve taken a nice bath,” she says.

For the bedside, Meghan arranges a small bouquet of flowers and makes some truffle popcorn in case her guests want a “late-night nibble”.

Meghan enjoys beekeeping…

Accompanied by bright closeups of yellow flowers, the series begins with Meghan watching as beekeeper Branden Aroyan pries open a beehive to harvest the honey inside.

“It’s that reminder to do something that scares you a little bit,” she says tentatively. “I’m trying to stay in the calm of it because it’s beautiful to be this connected.”

Later, Meghan scrapes the honey off the hive frame, clearly in awe of the whole process, and sieves it to get rid of the honeycomb.

She never really cared for honey before keeping bees, she says, but now she “appreciates” it so much after learning the process.

…and making beeswax candles

The series also contains Meghan’s tips for crafting and, in the first episode, that takes the form of candle-making.

She and Martin melt the leftover beeswax from her hives and pour it into containers with scented oils to make the candles. To keep the wick still while the candle sets, she suggests sticking it to the bottom of the container with a little wax and then slotting the top through a lollipop stick with a hole in it, laid across the rim.

They have to work fast while the wax stays at the right temperature. “We would be great in The Amazing Race,” they quip, referencing the reality show in which teams compete to race across the world.

Meghan’s tips to elevate your cooking

Throughout the first episode, Meghan constantly returns to the idea of “tiny details” making a difference when cooking, crafting and decorating, and offers tips for the audience to elevate their own homes.

She prepares a crudités platter – “there’s nothing so fancy about a crudités platter except it’s called crudités,” she says – and makes it “more artistic” by adding small fresh flowers on top of the vegetables.

When cooking spaghetti, she gives tips on how best to plate it: Put a little of the sauce on the plate first, then twist the spaghetti around a fork so it becomes a distinguishable shape rather than just a lump of pasta. She then finishes the look with some tomatoes from the sauce, basil, and a sprinkling of cheese.

And when baking a cake Meghan uses a serrated bread knife to even out each layer before assembling them. Instead of using a piping bag for the buttercream, her “hack” is to use a plastic Ziploc bag with one of the bottom corners cut off.

In this way, she pipes buttercream and raspberry jam in overlaid spirals between each layer to achieve a swirled frosting effect and make a cake that’s “beautiful on the inside.”

Homemade berry jam

The raspberry jam Meghan uses to decorate the cake is homemade using berries from her garden, she says.

Viewers who continue into episode two of the show will learn there are rows of berry bushes in Meghan’s garden that produce basketfuls of fruit when they are ripe.

She then goes on to reveal that her favorite preserve is apple butter because her grandmother used to make it so it is “sentimental”; she hopes that her children, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet, will associate her own jam-making with sweet smells wafting through the house when they come home from school.

To originally launch her lifestyle brand in April 2024, Meghan sent jars of homemade strawberry jam to influencers and friends, each one labelled with a number from one to 50.

But labeling the jam jars caused “people … to take it very personally,” Meghan tells actress and writer Mindy Kaling, who is the featured guest in episode two.

“It was not a ranking. It was just ‘let me share them,'” she says – adding, however, that she saved the jar labelled one of 50 for her mom.

Nine Entertainment Co (the publisher of this website) owns and operates the streaming service Stan.

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