Actually, stir fried cabbage is VEY good! You don't cook it to death, you just get it slightly wilted.
I don't have a fix for the latter, but PhotoShop seems to be working for the washout problem; I use "auto levels" to make the contrast a little better, and puch up the color saturation by a factor of 40 (on whatever 0-100 scale PhotoShop uses).
So that's what I've been doing this evening...going back through old pics (back to the camping trip in July) and fixing them.
One o' these days I'm going to offer my cousin $60 for the 4 MP Canon he bought in 2002 for $600 :) I'ts better and shoots higher frame rate video, with sound :)