MasterChef Canada aired last night and Newfoundland was there bringing traditional flavours to the country-wide contest.

Gander native Rebecca Abbott says she applied for MasterChef Canada on a whim one night around Christmas, and never expected to hear anything back.

Over half a year later she is a contestant and says she can hardly believe it.

Abbott says a big inspiration for her love for cooking came from her mom, who she says is also a great cook.

She says she’s loved cooking since she was five and following her mom around the kitchen.

Abbott wouldn’t consider herself a typical child when it came to food, because from an early age she had a strong curiosity about it. She would ask questions like ‘what is that?’, ‘why are you putting that in there?’, and then eventually that graduated to wanting to make it all herself.

“In university I struggled with food insecurity, and went to the food bank a lot, and I was really just trying to find ways to make a meal out of nothing – use my George Foreman grill, a little crockpot, and just figure things out.”