When it rains, friends, it’s a food news downpour.

Great stuff today, almost just in time for the month known for its frequent showers. It seems the last gusts of March’s windy nastiness have blown in a plethora of items to share with you — starting with some hard news out of Washington and ending with many bits of deliciousness related to the science and technology of food enjoyment.

First off, the news: Last night, the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington (RAMW) announced finalists for finalists for the 2008 “Rammy” awards. Many people and places you have seen in these virtual pages over the past year were nominated, including Hook, Proof, and Westend Bistro; two of the honored chefs were Todd Gray and Michel Richard. Go to www.ramw.org to see the full list.

The James Beard Foundation awards were also this week — they came out on Monday. Restaurant Eve, along with chef Jose Andres, were among those nominated. See www.jamesbeard.org for more. We won’t know the winners of either these or the Rammys until June, so stay tuned til then.

Today’s roundup features a mix of serious pieces to feed your head and items of the small-but-tasty variety.

From The New York Times there’s “Skipping Cereal and Eggs, and Packing On Pounds,” an article reporting on the “direct relationship between eating breakfast and body mass index.” Yet another study, this one in the recent issue of the journal Pediatrics, has confirmed what our grandfather apparently used to say: Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.

Really interesting (snort) and quite meaty (oink) is this story in The Washington Post about fast-casual fave Chipotle’s move to start serving its Charlottesville customers locally farmed pork from Virginia’s Polyface Farm.

This isn’t a small feat, it seems: “Chipotle’s experiment is emblematic of the enormous hurdles that face national chains hoping to embrace the eat-local trend that has until now been limited to exclusive restaurants and farmers markets. Food grown by small local farmers may taste fresher and require less fuel to transport, but the quantities rarely are large enough to sustain one busy restaurant, let alone hundreds.” If you care about stuff like this, or are just following this ginormous trend, take the time to check out this good piece of journalism.

We recently read that coffee’s political, too (shock!); there was a story last week about how Democrats are divided — the Obama camp loves Starbucks and the Hillary people are Dunkin D’s fans. Slightly ridiculous, but we’ll believe it.

Anyhow, those Starbucks Dems might have something else to be happy about: the Times reports that CEO Howard Schultz (no relation, sadly; note the offending “T” in his surname) has purchased the Coffee Equipment Company of Seattle, which makes something called the Clover.

It is, apparently, a coveted little machine: “Clovers are $11,000 machines that brew one cup at a time and have become essential equipment at some of the country’s top independent cafes.” Not everyone is happy with this; the indie peeps don’t like to see their stuff going to the big stage. But Starbucks is testing six Clovers, some in Boston and some in Seattle; the writer of this piece went with a famous coffee-taster to the Harvard Square Starbucks in Cambridge, Mass., to check out the beans. Read for yourself: Fresh-pressed makes a difference.

Knife aficionados (shout-out to our peeps in Damascus and Annapolis), put down your weapons for a sec. Desperate housewives with dull knives who mourn the loss of the mobile sharpening truck, take off your aprons and have a bon bon. This week’s Tool Test in TWP is all about knife sharpeners. It not only provides helpful general knife-101 counsel (“a sharp knife is a safe knife”), but it reviews the different options for giving that good gear of yours a worthy makeover. Go to the link to find out which one you should get. Dull is dangerous, folks.

Florence Fabricant does it again with her sharp eye. She has found croissants with “a fine ratio of crust to crumb so they are not bready” — very important to anyone who is picky about their buttery bread treats. How come they’re so good? Why, they’re made by robots, of course! Who knew the touch of a human hand is not always better when it comes to baking.

What we most enjoyed reading, though, on Wednesday, was the NYT’s story on putting together a gourmet meal by using supplies purchased from Jack’s 99-cent stores. We were stunned at the things New Yorkers have at their disposal for a buck (or five). Titled “How to Survive in New York on 99 Cents,” the writer hears through friends that the dollar stores have a surprising amount of good stuff on hand. Canned jalapenos and sofrito help him make a spicy meal, and he even tries out the meat options (they sound a bit scary). The best line in the story might be this one: “For dessert each night we turned to the slightly wanton charms of the Little Debbie product line, particularly young Debbie’s Oatmeal Creme Pies, whose velvety filling so perfectly captures an imagined marriage between buttercream frosting and Noxzema.” We were kinda thinking shaving cream.

BTW, the sidebar to the article is semi-unreal: “Asked by The New York Times to dream up a meal with products from a Jack’s 99-Cent Store, Mr. Ripert and his pastry chef, Michael Laiskonis, did not stop at the requested three courses.” Yes, Eric Ripert. The Times has some clout, to say the least.

OK, enough from the Old Gray Lady … no, wait, one more thing. There’s a fabulous story with a Tokyo dateline that shouldn’t be missed for global culture-watchers. It’s about the “Japanese cuisine known as yoshoku, or ‘Western food,’ in which European or American dishes were imported and, in true Japanese fashion, shaped and reshaped to fit local tastes.”

How ‘bout some “Napolitan” — pasta stir-fried with vegetables in ketchup? There’s also breaded, deep-fried hamburger.

The piece is packed with history, too, about how the Japanese long ago determined that eating a Western diet would be a way to be more competitive. Later, in the 1970s, “businessman named Den Fujita established McDonald’s in Japan and claimed that its menu would make Japanese as tall and attractive as Americans.

“Japanese are poorly built because they eat rice,” he said at the time. “We’ll change that with hamburgers. After eating hamburgers for a thousand years, Japanese will even have blond hair.” Isn’t it ironic?

This last item will move us nicely into thinking about beverages: The L.A. Times says this “tulip-shaped, stemless glass is elegant yet shatterproof.” Anyone who has cocktailed with Hot Plates knows of our complete devotion to stemware — really glassware in general — and we’re no snobs about it. Fancy is great, but picnic-ware is key. Pretty soon, as we take the parties out onto the grass, it’s the only thing we’ll need.