Still wearing her black-and-white-checked chef pants, Renee Kelly roamed the Thanksgiving gadget-packed sections of Sur La Table during a break from work on a recent fall day. Her mission at the Country Club Plaza store: Find tools that make preparing the T-Day meal more efficient — therefore better.

“This is where I’d go when I was in Houston,” says 32-year-old Kelly, whose culinary training was in Texas. But she was raised a Kansas girl. Her Dorothy-esque ruby-red clogs prove it, she points out.

For eight years, Kelly operated her own special-events venue in Shawnee. This year she converted it into Renee Kelly’s Harvest, a restaurant that focuses on meat and seasonal produce from dozens of local farmers. She often speaks publicly about small vs. large corporate farms.

“I compare it to classroom sizes,” she says. “If a teacher has fewer students, it’s easier to focus on each individual’s learning. The same could be said about paying attention to crops and animals.”