Former Baltimore radio sports reporter Jen Royle was eliminated Thursday on ABC's "The Taste" after making it to the finals.
The 39-year-old Royle was the only one of five finalists who was not a professional chef, and she was constantly referred to as the "home cook." She was the first of the five to be eliminated.
"If you had told me I'm going to wind up in the finals, I would have said no. I never would have believed it," Royle says at the the top of the show.
Her mentor was Los Angeles chef Ludo Lefebvre, and it felt as if he spent most of the evening's first segment yelling at her for putting too much salt in her sausage gravy.
"He's going to kill me," Royle said just before Ludo started yelling.
"You [expletive] up big time," he shouted.
Each of the five finalists cooked two dishes – one labeled a "saint" and one a "sinner" – which were served to Jonathan Waxman, chef at New York's Barbuto.
Waxman picked Royle's as the worst.
Royle showed the same kind of toughness during the run of the show that she showed while working at Baltimore's 105.7 The Fan.
She shouted back at Ludo on occasion, and when things got rough, she dug down and fought back to grind her way to the finals.
"You're like Freddie Krueger or the Terminator," mentor Anthony Bourdain told her. "You look in the rear-view mirror, and here she comes back from the dead."
Royle, who is working in her hometown of Boston as a sports reporter, said she thinks she will be going to culinary school.
But then, she added that she feels she learned so much from Ludo that maybe she can skip school and proceed straight to a job as a professional chef.