After spending a whole weekend living like Meghan Markle in the name of journalism, I obviously had to dive into the second season of her Netflix show.
And while I won’t be water marbling scarves or whipping up olive oil soap anytime soon, “With Love, Meghan” has still motivated me to adopt a new weekly ritual.
Inspiration hit during episode four, when Meghan hosted the delightfully enthusiastic chef Samin Nosrat in her star-studded neighborhood of Montecito, California.
As they made a delicious-looking chicken salad, Nosrat told Meghan about the weekly dinner she hosts with her friends.
“It’s called ‘Monday Dinner,'” Nosrat explained. “We share all the responsibilities. I’ve lived by myself for a long time, but I love cooking, and oftentimes the things I want to make, I want to share.”
Craving connection
Courtesy of Netflix
Nosrat’s “Monday Dinner” has been going on for four years, bringing together people she said were once “not the closest of friends.”
“Then we started these dinners, and now they’re my family,” Nosrat told Meghan. “Proximity and time has created a depth of the relationships that I don’t know I could have ever imagined. A lot of people are craving something like that in their lives.”
“Once upon a time, religion was a really reliable source for that ritual, connection, and community — but not everyone is religious these days,” she added. “We call it our religion.”
This search for connection, whether emotional or tactile, is discussed quite a few times in the second season of “With Love, Meghan.” As they made flower bouquets in the first episode, Milk Bar founder Christina Tosi told Meghan it had been “one of the most joyful days.”
“No one invites anyone over to come play and lose yourself, learn something new,” Tosi added.
In the following episode, Chrissy Teigen told Meghan that “it’s so nice to do things with your hands that don’t involve electronics.”
“I could do this every day,” Teigen said as they pressed flowers to turn into jewelry. “I have terrible anxiety, and the only time I’m not nervous is when I’m doing something like this.”
A recipe for ritual
Jake Rosenberg/Netflix
Nosrat’s cookbook, “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat,” earned her a James Beard Award, but she told Meghan that Monday Dinner is about deciding on dishes and cooking with her friends — not for them.
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“A big part of it is making it together and deciding together,” Nosrat said. “We all put it permanently in our calendar. It’s so sacred to us. We can invite others to come, but that’s the thing that we have built.”
“The meal, to me, is way more about what’s happening with each other,” she added. “Who’s around the table, rather than what’s on the table.”
Hosting a weekly dinner for friends is obviously not a novel concept, but how many of us actually do it anymore? It seems one of the universal experiences of hitting your 30s is how hard it suddenly becomes to make plans. Our weekends are packed with weddings, birthdays, and baby showers, while weeknights seem devoted to Netflix and TikTok.
It’s the perfect recipe for isolation and burnout — no wonder America’s in the middle of a loneliness epidemic.
Courtesy of Netflix
Turning community into routine seems to be the perfect solution. Jay Shetty and his wife Radhi Devlukia, who are also featured in Meghan’s Netflix show, told her they host a weekly Friday game night with an open invitation to 40 friends. Sometimes only a handful come, and sometimes all 40 show up.
As Meghan told Nosrat, you can create a ritual “without being fussy or complicated.”
While watching the episode, I was reminded of the supper club my friends and I tried to start a few years ago. We planned to visit a new restaurant in LA once a month, which sounded easy enough. But every month, we struggled to find a date that worked with everyone’s schedules, and people frequently bowed out amid budget concerns. It didn’t even last a year.
I’ve always wanted to revive the supper club, and now I think I can. The ingredients were simple: a fixed date on the calendar, a simple home-cooked meal, and a table full of friends.
That’s the perfect recipe for connection.
