Nope, it doesn't taste like chicken.

In recent weeks, some voters may have acquired a curiosity, if not a taste, for moose - after hearing that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has stalked, shot, skinned and stewed moose.

That may sound like a startling achievement to urbanites, though I'm not certain it bears much relevance to her vice-presidential qualifications.

But there are women in other parts of the country who hunt moose for the meat - using either bows or rifles. And that got me thinking - What if I wanted to put myself to the moose test? How far would I have to travel to stalk the beast, and how much kitchen-counter space would I need to butcher it? After all, I only have a two-bedroom townhouse.

Is it OK to strap a 1,500-pound moose to a PhillyCarShare vehicle?

And if the meat from one moose would feed a family for a year, how many moose croquettes am I looking at? Maybe I'd better invite that pitchman from the Encore frozen-dinner commercials to bring his family along.

Clearly I needed more information, and here is some of what I learned:

Moose are vegans (no fish, no flesh, no dairy).

Moose are kosher, according to Jewish dietary laws, if they are ritually slaughtered.

And it's illegal to sell moose meat in this country. (The USDA only allows the sale of game meat that has been farm-raised.)

So the only way to get your mitts on moose is to bag it yourself or get some as a gift from a friend.

Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire have moose hunts, and Liza Poinier at New Hampshire's Fish and Wildlife office says the nine-day season, which starts Oct. 18, is a particularly festive time.

New Hampshire, home to 6,000 moose (versus 1.3 million people) sells its 515 moose-hunting licenses by lottery, and they always sell out.

Poinier says Palin likely had help getting her moose from point A to point B.

"They're awfully big," Poinier says.

Five hundred to 1,500 pounds big. So the animal generally has to be field-dressed and quartered just to get it out of the woods.

Field-dressing is a clean, efficient phrase to describe a gory task that can be harder than tracking the moose in the first place. Wear gloves.

Once it's quartered, the moose can be taken to a specialty butcher and prepped for roasting, grilling, stewing, or made into sausages, patties and the like.

What if I wanted to cook moose meat at home?

On this point, the old reliable Moosewood Cookbook is of no use, being for vegetarians. And I can't consult M.F.K. Fisher's essay How to Cook a Wolf, because that is, as they say, a whole 'nother animal.

So I call Sonny D'Angelo, whose Italian Market shop offers caribou, antelope, kangaroo, ostrich, llama, camel and impala for sale locally or online.

D'Angelo, whose cookbook Are You Game? contains 216 recipes for hunters, says the game meats he sells are farm-raised, fed naturally, humanely harvested, and government inspected.

But if I were to get my tongs on some moose and cook it myself, D'Angelo says, it would taste like elk.

Hmm. That's not much help for a city slicker.

Better put in a call to Laraine Derr, of the Chez Alaska Cooking School in Juneau's Nugget Mall.

Derr offers classes in making moose meatballs and moose sliders for the thousands of cruise-ship travelers who pass through that state's Inside Passage each year, as well as classes for locals in stewing and canning moose.

For her sliders, Derr puts 11/2-ounce grilled moose patties on sourdough bread with wild cranberry ketchup and sauteed smoked onions.

She says the meat is tender and delicious.

Moose are more plentiful in Alaska than in New Hampshire, Derr says, especially in Palin's neck of the woods.

"Where she lives you can just go out a short distance and find a moose," Derr says. "Even in Anchorage, moose just come wandering by."

That isn't the way it happened for Lansdale native Cheryl Briere. She and her husband, who live in New Hampshire now and bagged a moose there in 2004, hunted four days straight.

"We see moose and their tracks and where they bed down all the time," Briere said, "But you have to train and be physically able to stalk the animals up hills, and over downed trees."

And that's while carrying a pack with a tarp and other equipment for field-dressing, food and water, camping gear, and more.

The Brieres entered the New Hampshire wildlife lottery for years before winning in 2004. They were after the meat - not the antlers. And they knew what to expect because in New Hampshire, if you come across roadkill you can claim it through the state and take it home. And the Brieres had been the lucky recipients of two roadkill moose.

"We prefer the taste to any steak or cow meat," Cheryl Briere said.

The moose they finally bagged was a two-year-old cow (female) that weighed about 600 pounds and yielded 250 to 300 pounds of meat.

"The meat was tender like veal. There was no fat on it. In fact, the butcher said be real careful when you're handling this, you could put your fingers right through it.

"We got ribs, and roasts that we grilled. We brushed it with some olive oil and some herbs and cook it 130 degrees for medium-rare.

"It's just divine."

It was his refusal to shoot a bear cub for sport in 1902 that turned Theodore Roosevelt into a beloved teddy.

But food has long been a political hot potato.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan's administration famously categorized ketchup as a vegetable, to meet minimum nutrition requirements for school lunches.

In 1990, George H.W. Bush had the audacity to bad-mouth broccoli. "I haven't liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it," 41 said.

In 1992, during Bill Clinton's first run for the White House, Hillary was vilified for not baking cookies.

"I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas," she said, "but what I decided to do was fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life."

That same year, then-Vice President Dan Quayle attended an elementary school spelling bee and "corrected" a sixth-grader who had correctly spelled potato.

"Add an e on the end," Quayle incorrectly advised the student.