salad days

the time when you were young and had little experience of life But that was in my salad days, before I got married and had children.

The time of youth, innocence, and inexperience, as in Back in our salad days we went anywhere at night, never thinking about whether it was safe or not . This expression, alluding to the greenness of inexperience, was probably invented by Shakespeare in Antony and Cleopatra (1:5), when Cleopatra, now enamored of Antony, speaks of her early admiration for Julius Caesar as foolish: "My salad days, when I was green in judgment, cold in blood."

A time of youthful inexperience and carefree pleasures, usually looked back on with nostalgia. The phrase came from Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra, in which the Queen of the Nile reflected on “My salad days / When I was green in judgment: cold in blood . . .”