Homemade Baby Prune Puree

My son is seven months old and has had stomach issues for the past couple of months. Our pediatrician suggested giving him prune juice several times a day to help get things...moving. After hitting up our local Babies R Us, Target, Kroger and HEB, I found my only options to be organic prune juice or "conventional" juice. No baby prune juice in sight!! I try and do as much organic for Baby A as possible, but the bottle was $8.00!!! I would have to buy a new bottle every couple of days to keep the juice fresh. I quickly tried to find another option that wasn't going to cost me twenty bucks a week.

I stumbled upon a container of organic prunes from Aurora Natural in the produce section of HEB. It was around $6.00 for an 11 ounce container. Not bad for certified organic pitted prunes!

I make Baby A's baby food myself. I enjoy cooking and it really is very easy. Another bonus of making his food is that I know exactly what he is eating. There are no weird preservatives, no ascorbic acid added to preserve the color and he will get to try all sorts of fruits and veggies that aren't available on the shelf of my grocery store. I think it is really strange that baby bananas are pink! Very, very strange. 

Baby prune puree was NOT easy to make.

Here is what I did:

First, I rinsed the prunes off and set them in a bowl. I poured enough distilled water on top of the fruit to submerge all of it and let soak for an hour.

 

After soaking, I placed my prunes in the my food processor and gave them a whirl!! DO NOT throw away the water that you soaked the fruit in. I used this water to thin the puree out because it was very thick and sticky. I probably used about two cups of the reserved water.

 

 

 

Now, I pureed this for about 10 minutes and it still had skin and lumps that are too big for my son at the moment. I poured the fruit into a sieve and pressed the puree through with a spatula. I had to scrape off the bottom of the sieve several times to let more puree through.

 

 

The above picture is what my puree looked like after going through my sieve. Below is the stuff that wouldn't go through. Appealing huh??

 

 

I then poured my puree into a BPA free ice cube tray and stuck it in the freezer overnight. I do this with all of the baby food that I make. It is more time efficient for me to make a big batch of something and defrost a cube at a time. This puree is something you definitely want to mix with something else. We mixed it with a cube of applesauce that I had made about a week before and Baby A loved it!!! With 11 ounces of dried prunes, I got 10 cubes. Each cube is approximately one ounce. I don't think this is cheaper than buying a pouch of organic baby prunes, but I think it is the perfect portion for us. The Plum organic pouches are about $1.25 for a 3 ounce container and you have to use the entire container within 24 hours of opening. I don't think my son could possibly eat the whole pouch in a day, so my prune purée cubes work best for our family!!! Bon appetit!!!