Welcome to our world

It has been a year since we moved into Sandbach in Cheshire. We found our home after traveling around for many years. We have previously lived in Chester, Salford, Manchester, Switzerland and London.

We have been married since 2008 and a lot has happened in that time that has got us to the place we are now.

over 10 years ago:

• DJ didn’t have type 1 diabetes
• Justine had not conquered her stammer on th Mcguire Stammering course
• Justine had not yet done a masters degree
• Justine had not developed uveitis
• we were yet to travel to India, China, Switzerland, Germany, France, Italy, USA, Ecuador.

So how did we get here?

We started out as a young couple who met by being best friends. We always loved to host and entertain but life had its way of giving us our own personal challenges and drama.

DJ developed type 1 diabetes in his late twenties. This was a shock for both of us. Justine was amazing and researched food. She made a differnt recipie each time she cooked and we tried out a lot more flavours and techniques that we had not heard of. DJ got into baking and we started to make all our food from scratch. The more we did this the more we wanted to understand it.

Life was not simple as we had to understand how our food affects our bodies. We had to learn how to count carbohydrates.

A few years later Justine developed an autoimmune condition called uveitus. This is a serious condition where Justines body attacks her eyes. As part of this we learnt about antibiotics and how they can be transferred from the food we consume. With this, and an intolerance to dairy, Justine decided to go on a vegan diet. This agiain gave us inspiration to learn about food in a different way. We were so used to eating meat that we were not thinking about how it got to our table.

“Vegetables taste so much better than meat, there are so many more flavours”

We found that there are some great ways to eat healthy. Great recipes and you can get a much better balanced diet when you explore food.

We took some time traveling and now we always think about what food we can experience next. We really want to share the journey of food and community. Look beyond a recipe to see how we come together over food.

We now want to settle down here at Rushcroft. Build up our family and explore how we can be more self sustaining, plastic free and share food with people.