What I learned from cooking 6 of the duchess’s go-to dishes

If you’re watching Meghan Markle whip up dishes on her Netflix lifestyle show, With Love, Meghan, and thinking, That looks good, consider yourself warned: You’re going to need edible flower sprinkles. You can buy your “confetti for your plating” directly from the duchess’s As Ever website for $15. I got mine off Amazon for $9.

For those who haven’t seen the show, which already has two seasons under its belt since debuting in March, you’ve missed Meghan of Sussex welcoming celebrities and culinary stars into the kitchen (it’s not her actual home) and collaborating on a dish, and maybe some crafts, together. Something that both thrills and annoys me about Meghan’s show is that half her projects are absurdly elaborate (who wants to make homemade graham crackers?), while the other half are almost offensively mundane. Here she is emptying a large bag of pretzeIf you’re watching Meghan Markle whip up dishes on her Netflix lifestyle show, With Love, Meghan, and thinking, That looks good, consider yourself warned: You’re going to need edible flower sprinkles. You can buy your “confetti for your plating” directly from the duchess’s As Ever website for $15. I got mine off Amazon for $9.ls into a smaller bag to give as a gift. Here she is gift-wrapping a square, easily wrappable book. Here she is making fancy toast, sprinkling flowers on it and calling it “tartine.”

As cultural critic Anne Helen Peterson noted on her Culture Study Podcast, “there is so much going on” here. While I have my quibbles with the show — it’s serene and soothing but also, well, out of touch — I wanted to know: How’s the food? I also wanted to see how Meghan’s aesthetic of casual-elegant hosting translates to an actual human with a normal kitchen (my own), two cranky kids and a dishwasher that sounds like a jet engine.

Here’s how it went.

Day 1: Fruit Rainbow

To kick things off, I considered which “recipe” I could crib from this show that would require the least possible time and money. And then I remembered the “fruit rainbow.” In the first season of With Love, Meghan, the duchess assembles the fruit platter for her kids and their friends. Translation: She cuts up fruit and arranges it by color. That’s it.

To be fair, my kids were delighted when I recreated this (poorly). My 3-year-old shrieked “rainbow snack!” and inhaled the raspberries. My 10-year-old became fixated on the fact that there was no “indigo” item and insisted I add dried prunes. But calling this a recipe is like calling a beer a cocktail. Nonetheless, Meghan presents hers with such solemn pride, as though no parent before her has ever noticed that grapes are green and blueberries are blue.

Verdict: Fun for kids, slightly insulting for adults.

Day 2: French Toast

Next up: French toast. In Episode 1 of the second season, Meghan makes this with Tan France, which feels mostly like an excuse for the British Queer Eye star to say “custard” a half-dozen times in his fabulous accent. They pour eggs and milk into a bowl, dunk the bread and eventually the flower sprinkles make their appearance. And yet, somehow, Meghan makes this look glamorous. My version? Less so.

I cracked my eggs, whisked, dunked and immediately got distracted by my child asking if Pokémon can eat pancakes. When I looked back, the pan was smoking. The end result: still delicious (because French toast is hard to ruin). In the chaos, I forgot to take a photo.

Verdict: Achievable. But a Meghan-style live-in stylist and/or nanny would be helpful.

Day 3: Apple Butter Tartine

In season 2, Meghan presents an apple butter tartine to culinary rock star and seemingly delightful human being Samin Nosrat with the gravitas of a Michelin chef. She slices sourdough, layers apple butter and fresh ricotta with apple slices, lemon zest and thyme.

I went rogue with this one, going with a sourdough bagel and adding fresh raspberries as well as those godforsaken flower sprinkles. It tasted great, but that’s likely because it’s toast. Still, I, like Nosrat, give Meghan points for layering different flavors and textures.

Verdict: 10/10 for taste … though I’m not sure it really needed an entire cooking segment on the show.

Day 4: Alice Waters’s Garlic-Sherry Vinegar Dressing and Carrot-Top Pesto

Speaking of culinary luminaries, Season 1 concludes with none other than Alice Waters, the mother of the farm-to-table movement. Like Nosrat, Waters is magnetic not because she’s flashy or premeditated, but because she’s so knowledgeable and authentically passionate about food. The Waters recipes I selected to try seemed straightforward: a vinaigrette and a pesto sauce spin.

I’ve made many a salad dressing in my time, but Waters’s tip to use sherry vinegar and mash the garlic cloves with salt did add a punchier flavor. As for the pesto, I’m all for reducing food waste, so using carrot tops in the sauce felt like a win. I got creative and used both pistachios and sunflower seeds for my nutty base, and mixed the tops with more traditional basil. But I did note that the call for lengthy carrot tops — keep those shorn nubs that come in a plastic bag at the grocery store — is a definite flex that you shop at a farmers’ market.

Verdict: Tasty, and a bit bougie.

Day 5: Heirloom Tomato Quiche

Ah, the quiche. The one Meghan drums up with Alice Waters is picturesque, all buttery crust and jewel-toned heirlooms sliced into geometric perfection. Mine was … pretty beige. I carefully layered my tomatoes and poured in the custard. Forty minutes later, I pulled out what looked like an egg pie from a 1970s church cookbook.

Flavor? Excellent. Quiche is forgiving. Waters’s classic recipe uses more cream than I typically would, which did make it better. But Meghan’s quiche, with its rainbow slices and top-notch kitchen lighting, seemed like something you’d serve to dignitaries at a garden brunch. Mine was eaten standing up over the counter while my kid asked if he could pick all the tomatoes out of his.

Verdict: Delicious, but unless you have a camera crew, expect yours to look more like breakfast-for-dinner than royal garden party.

Day 6: Bo Ssam

Finally, the pièce de résistance: the Momofuku-inspired Bo Ssam. In the show, Meghan cheerfully tackles David Chang’s famously time-intensive pork shoulder — except, of course, she calls in reinforcements: Chang himself and his pal and fellow star chef, Milk Bar’s Christina Tosi.

I’m a vegetarian, so I swapped the shredded pork with vegan chorizo and skipped the fresh oysters entirely. I carefully copied Chang’s ginger-scallion sauce. I bought local kimchi. I do not have a gigantic garden through which to wander and hand-select individual butter lettuce leaves like Meghan does, so I bought a (also local!) butter lettuce head to wrap it all up in. And honestly, I could eat this weird vegan Franken-Bo-Ssam every day.

Verdict: The most delicious of all the recipes. Also, my house now smells (permanently?) of gochujang, which I don’t hate.

So, did I become Meghan Markle by way of my stove?

No. But also, not no? I mean, if you had asked me the last time I tried cooking six (seven, if you count the salad dressing) new-to-me recipes in quick succession, I would have told you never. I’m more of a try-one-new-dish-per-month kind of gal, with many age-old recipe repeats in between.

Cooking from Meghan’s show felt, oddly, a lot like watching it: Sometimes achievable, sometimes absurd, mostly soothing. The experiment had me feeling that I, too, may secretly be cooking royalty wrapped in a Meghanesque layer of curated calm that bears little resemblance to my actual kitchen, where the smoke alarm goes off at least twice a week.

And all that food I made? It was, largely, excellent. The pesto will be in rotation. I’ve finally hacked the best dressing thanks to Alice Waters. The French toast will be repeated, as will that phenomenal Bo Ssam remix. The apple butter tartine will be my go-to when I want to offer my kid a “dessert” that’s not 150% sugar. (There will be no flower sprinkles on it next time.)

Will I make homemade graham crackers? Absolutely not. But some tasks are best left to a duchess.