Zip-lock bags are extremely helpful when you are cooking while you are camping. They come in lots of sizes from 1 pint to 2 gallons. You don't have to buy expensive ones for most uses. Many stores have off-brands, so be sure and check at discount stores, grocery stores, or dollar stores.

Here are ten ideas and tips for using zip-lock bags to help your outdoor cooking chores by a lot easier.

- Pre-measure and store seasonings for a dish in a zip-lock bag. You don't have to take all the individual seasoning containers, nor worry about leaving one behind. Just dump into the pan when you are cookiing that dish.

- Put all the zip-lock bags and other ingredients for each meal into a large zip-lock bag (1 or 2 gallon). This keeps everything for the meal in one place. Add copies of the recipes, if needed, to the bag and you are ready to go.

- Pre-mix ingredients and put them in zip-lock bags. For example, are you cooking pancakes for breakfast? If so, then max the dry ingredients in a zip-lock bag and write on it (a Sharpie works well). When morning comes, add the liquid ingredients to the bag and mix up. There are no dishes to wash. You don't have any cleanup. All you have to do to cleanup is toss the empty bag in the garbage.

- Pre-measuring ingredients also works great for such food items as rice, pasta, sugar, flour, instant mashed potatoes, powdered drink mix, and almost any other similar ingredient. Mark the bag with the ingredient, amount, and what meal it is for.

- Zip-lock bags are great for marinating meat prior to grilling them. You can even freeze the marinated meat ahead of time. This lets you get this dish ready for in advance.

- Precook rice or pasta at home. Store the rice or pasta in zip-lock bags. When you get to camp, you won't need to spend time cooking rice or pasta for dinner, because it has already been done. Just dump it in to the pan you are cooking in and heat it up.

- If you have leftovers, zip-lock bags are great to use to store the leftovers in cooler. One great idea is use all the saved leftovers (depending on what you have) to make omelets for the last breakfast. Just add eggs to the zip-lock bags, mix up, and cook.

- Another handy thing you can do is to pre-cut meat and store it in zip-lock bags. That way when you get to your campsite and you're trying to make dinner, you won't have to worry the messy cleanup needed if you have already done it at home. You can even pre-cook the meats and store in zip-lock bags. When you get to camp, just heat up and you are ready to go.

- You can also pre-cut vegetables and store them in zip-lock bags.

- Snacks store great in zip-lock bags. Use them to store snacks trail-mix, snack mix, pretzels, dried fruit, etc. You could even make bags for each member of your family or group so there isn't any arguing over portions.